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Introduction

Now and then I get hit by themes from multiple unrelated sources. A speaker in a podcast observed that the best thing we might for the human condition was to become more self-aware through intentional effort. I had been writing on the crisis in DEI and concluded that at its core DEI is about our deliberate efforts to be more open to and inclusive of, others. But the motive was more evolutionary than moral. We were evolving more complex and pluralistic cultures but still operating on psychological reflexes established in our very ancient past.  

I liked that the podcast speaker didn’t assert any particular beliefs, or methods – just evolving our self-awareness with intent – and an open mind. 

The danger in the DEI space is that we imagine greater inclusivity is good in a moral sense and assume that those not so inclined are not so good. This is a recipe for conflict – and that’s not how you advance inclusion – by excluding those who disagree with you.  

The DEI crisis emphasized how a sense of moral certainty is neither sufficient nor necessary. Goodwill is, though. 

DEI has become a formalization of a philosophical approach which is embodied in Matthew 22:39 (the 2^nd ‘great commandment’ – love your neighbor as yourself) It is a sense of duty rather than a moral imperative. That is to a say it is on us to behave inclusivity, not something we demand of other people. 

There’s a slippery psychological process that kicks in when we believe we have a right to demand behaviors of others. If they do not conform to what we say, we can exclude them, regardless of whether we are prepared to hold ourselves to the same standard. This is the trouble with moral righteousness. It is rooted in certainty and not in self-awareness.  

This goes to the very core of the Christian story now long overlaid by dogmas, distractions and diversions which give cover to avoid confronting the stark requirement of the two ‘greatest commandments’ – become self-aware (inwardly and outwardly). This isn’t an argument for Christianity. This is a universal principle. But it is the core of our culture (religious or secular), expressed in so many ways.

The simplicity of the theme

The thing about these two commandments is that they are setting a theme without prescription. How to I love my god? (or whatever the secular equivalent is) How do I love my neighbor? These are deep questions that should excite inquiry, reflection and experimentation. From such questions we will generate much commentary and advice – and this is true of whatever tradition/path we elect to follow. 

However, we also see that an exemption is woven into many traditions. We craft exemptions to the ‘love thy neighbor’ commandment because this is the hardest thing to do. We are hardwired to exclude. We innately form in-groups and out-groups, and this gives us a permission to deny, reject or exclude that feels okay deep down. It is natural, but its not always the right or good thing to do.

That the point of this injunction to love thy neighbor is to evolve our sense of common being and fellowship can be safely edited out of religious teaching because it is too hard an ask of a follower – if you want many of them to conform to the larger mission of a religion (which isn’t always to follow the founder’s teachings). 

Adherence to this injunction is reserved for the more saintly followers. The rest are excused the effort beyond being obliged to love those neighbors who are members of their in-group (sect, cult or denomination). There’s a reason the ‘good Samaritan’ story is told. It was okay to exclude some people. It still is.

In terms of how we might understand psychological maturity and health, asking some folks to be sufficiently self-aware of their own biases and self-righteousness might be asking too much. Our more primitive psychological reflexes aren’t ‘wrong’ or bad. They served our survival needs for 100s of thousands of years. 

Wisdom/religious traditions have pearls of great beauty that are only background noise to the majority.  What can apply to individuals will not apply to communities – beyond it being an aspiration, rather than a moral injunction.

Good neighbors

We can aspire to love our neighbors knowing that we are driven by psychological reflexes that value not doing so. 

In general, we live in communities in which we are cool about our neighbors. This might be substantially because we don’t know them beyond a superficial degree. 

David Rock from the Neuroleadership Institute was clear that religion, sexuality and politics were not good subjects for discussion in the workplace. We can be good work neighbors by not delving into themes that might trigger contentious passions. 

This raises the proposition that details of a person’s life that might arouse strong feelings are really none of our business in the context of a workplace or even a neighborhood. 

There are requirements for being a good neighbor that concern civility, a lack of criminality and other behaviors that might otherwise disturb the peace and order of a community. There’s a contentious dimension in that this might also include not drawing attention to one’s own attributes that might arouse adverse passions in others. This is where DEI got into bother. What is fair to demand of others or oneself in a complex, diverse and pluralistic community? I don’t propose an answer to that here. 

There is a well-intended desire that we all have the right to bring our whole selves to work. But that is, I think a vague idealized sentiment. Maybe a trade off in our complex, diverse and pluralistic communities and workplaces is that we don’t – beyond a certain level of discrete authenticity. Even in a setting that is psychologically safe we need to self-police how much we might wisely disclose or express in our behavior.

We cannot demand others be more than they are. For a bunch of reasons that include historic, cultural, religious and personal life experience reasons we are at different degrees of self-awareness and self-control. 

There isn’t a valid moral reason to demand unfettered self-expression. The need for discretion has always been there. 

There is, I believe, a valid aspiration to see that our communities and workplaces are as open and inclusive as possible. It is not reasonable to demand freedom of expression for oneself while denying it to others. But some communities which are dominated by particular outlooks on life will assert their right to dominate. To misread this as a matter of justice and moral right is to assert a right that is not universally recognised. 

Neighbors are who they are, and we live with that reality by not digging too deep. In communities dominated by particular outlooks, it may not be possible to ignore unwelcome interest. Wisdom and political sense should trump naïve assertions of rights.

Pending the widespread growth of self-awareness, we are stuck with what we have, not as a moral affront but as an artefact of history and cultural and personal evolution. 

We do not improve things by pointing at others and demanding they change – and excluding them until they do. 

The injunction to love thy neighbor as thy self means to see that others with whom we may disagree on matters important to us may look at us in the same way. Presumption of moral failing for not conforming to our beliefs and standards is not a fair, reasonable or kind thing. 

Our common attributes

We humans have way more in common than what distinguishes us from each other. The details might be very different but the psychological processes that drive our behaviour are the same. 

There are some who are not good neighbors. They bring strife and disruption to our communities. It is tempting to reject and isolate them, and it is our natural reflex to do so. But is it always just and wise?

With the many challenges facing us as individuals the idea that we might need to collectively become somewhat more self-aware seems reasonable. 

On a distinctly spiritual level we aren’t talking anything different. The idea that our spirituality is essentially about what we believe is a very modern thing. But it’s essentially about attitudes and values. It’s like the way our nutrition is about the essentials of a decent diet and not about cuisines or table manners and table settings. Those things might be important on a personal or cultural level, but they don’t have a determinative impact on our diet. 

Fears and stresses

There is a steady flow of reports on significant mental health challenges that impact people at all ages. Relationships are under stress – or hard to establish. 

We are in a time when certainties are failing us, when those who look into the future see little to enthuse over.

I am not one of them. There are challenges and difficulties ahead. Our economic, social and political systems aren’t fit for purpose anymore. We do need a period of effective and positive change. But we are in a time when we are collectively more disposed to escapism and disengagement than putting an effort in to being part of the solution. 

I like the call for greater self-awareness as a response to these times. It does mean we must put in the cognitive and emotional effort to adapt to the reality that is emerging. 

A call for greater self-awareness isn’t dogmatic or proscriptive. It’s not even moral. It is more pragmatic. It argues that we make a greater effort to be more aware of what is going on around us so we can adapt to the changes that are washing over us. 

I am cautious about assertions that ET will make their presence known so widely that the evidence will be unambiguous. But I have little doubt that should this happen the existential crisis that will be precipitated will be catastrophic to many. It would be a deeply rude shock to those glued to their smart phone screens. 

It is interesting that now even books on management and organizational behaviour are talking of love being a desired attribute of leaders, along with emotional intelligence. It’s not that these sources are outliers, rather they are affirmations of other similar sentiments from less formal sources. 

Being more loving necessarily means being more self-aware. The trends toward significant changes in our lives aren’t necessarily going to be diminished but greater self-awareness (by all the names we might call it) will make our adaptation less traumatic. 

I think the changes are good and necessary. But, looking at the way the far right is responding, denial of them can become desperate. Misconstruing these changes as a moral force also impedes efforts to adapt more gracefully.  From a political perspective both sides of the popular divide have lost realistic vision and voice. 

A vital perspective

There is a necessary distinction to be made between individual spirituality and participation in a religious tradition. Religious traditions are communal constructs that embody cosmologies, cultural histories, philosophies, metaphysical systems, social mores and so on. They are not spiritual pathways – although such pathways will exist within a tradition. These traditions are a cultural ecosystem in which individuals exist – as members of groups and on a personal level. Such ecosystems are not equivalent to personal spiritual practices but can be containers of them. 

There is a larger container, western civilization, which embraces religious and non-religious world views. 

Self-awareness as an intentional personal practice may begin with religious activity but embraces the prospect of transcending it. I don’t here mean that self-awareness will necessarily lead to abandoning a religious tradition, only that it may do. 

Efforts at self-awareness allow for the evolution of insight that may include changing one’s relationship with one’s faith tradition. That might include confronting a distinction between a philosophical issue and a cultural tradition. 

Perhaps the best example of this is Dan McClellan’s work (check it out on YouTube). McClellan is a religious scholar who argues that Christianity is a negotiable belief system. It is not an inherently true system but contains truths of various degrees and shades. One can be a devout Christian but lacking much self-awareness or a deeply self-aware adherent to a very nuanced interpretation of the tradition. 

We can imagine self-awareness as a predictable pathway, but that would be a problematic assumption. As an evolutionary process we might reasonably engage in a movement away from reflexive belief in a dogma, but that may involve a deep examination of the dogma – or a reactive rejection of it. 

Self-awareness isn’t a state we arrive at so much as a process we undertake. 

We can think of our efforts at achieving knowledge, understanding, insight etc as part of the natural impetus upon human consciousness to evolve through states of awareness to a more refined condition. Our traditions describe states of enlightenment or union with the divine. Materialists imagine a disembodied knowledge-infused state. Regardless of what we believe there is a common sense of progression toward a state of awareness beyond what we now have. It could be a restoration, a redemption or a novel progression. But whether our sense is cyclical or linear, getting there is still a goal we have – to the extent that we have a vision of such. 

We can think about self-awareness as a non-dogmatic aspirational goal. It’s a kind of openness to insight about our own beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. The language of reflection is secular and scientific (human sciences). This is not to reject the metaphysical or esoteric but only to free up our awareness from habituated or dogmatic thought.

The power of doubt

I am entirely comfortable with the idea of spirit communication (which I have experienced) but I want a sense of rational (genuine) scepticism to guide how I might reflect upon that experience. Genuine scepticism is about doubting whether one’s interpretation of an experience is appropriate, not whether the experience happened. My fundamentalist Christian family members might assert that God spoke to them.  My reaction is to ask “How do you know that who ‘spoke’ to you was God? I don’t have a fundamental issue with the idea that a deeper spiritual reality motivated a person to talk to themselves in order to allow that person to believe an important truth. But I also allow it was a religiously motivated delusion. I can form a personal belief about their claim, but I must also confess to myself that I do not know. 

Maybe God did speak to them? Maybe that same God speaks to us all – but only through whatever filters we allow to be valid? Our capacity for doubt must include our reflexes to create interpretative narratives about our experiences. Is it okay for us to invalidate another’s experience just because it does not mesh with our beliefs about how reality works? 

A capacity for doubt is the toehold necessary for self-awareness to evolve. But though it’s necessary, it’s not sufficient. 

Doubting what others say is not even half the answer. Self-doubt in the healthy sense is essential. Doubting our interpretation of what we hear or see is important. This not only because these days our information environment is replete with deception and distortion coming from other actors, but because what we believe is a filter that can/will distort our awareness of what is knowable. 

We have become captive to a great myth of our culture- what we fancy is rational thought is free of emotional distortion. Nothing could be further from reality. 

Reason was once the attribute of the soul but, under the persuasive power of materialist thought it became the attribute of mind. And the dark twin of reason was emotion – a lower form of consciousness associated with the body’s lesser processes. 

As our understanding of intelligence has evolved, we are coming to better understand that the great power of intelligence is not the raw processing power of the intellect but a capacity for imagination. So many of our great discoveries have come from imagining, not from reasoned thought – which is more like the housekeeper/librarian of our consciousness – tidying up after an imaginative party. 

In a sense self-awareness is the capacity to dare to imagine what the soul says. It will speak to us any way we allow ourselves to hear. But we often offer up only the filters of belief and dogma as permissible instruments to receive its voice. We can earnestly beseech our inner spirit for wisdom and insight but permit only a distorted voice to reply.

Conclusion

We are in an age when secular rational sources are saying we must become more self-aware so that we can respond effectively to the emerging challenges. These messages are coming from business schools and other entities whose primary functions are to sustain what we have. 

There has been a steady trend towards a convergence of scientific, philosophical and spiritual themes – on the subjects of self-awareness and the need to adapt to emerging disruptive conditions – climatic, technological, political, and social.

So, whether we are thinking in terms of keeping what we have or changing it for something better, we have work to do on ourselves.

Resources

Many of us struggle to find the time to access new ideas that stimulate self-reflection. One useful source is podcasts that can be listened to on a work commute, while exercising or doing chores. All you need is cell phone and earphones/earbuds. Below are some of my go-to podcasts. There is an abundance to explore beyond this brief list:

• The Thinking Mind Podcast
• Evolving Psychiatry
• Freakonomics Radio
• The Psychology Podcast
• To The Best of Our Knowledge
• No Stupid Questions
• You Are Not So Smart
• Ideas (CBC)
• Late Night Live (ABC Radio National)
• The Telepathy Tapes

Introduction

I came across a remark that equated our physical bodies to spacesuits. My immediate reaction was “That’s silly, why not Earth suits?”

This random thought arose from a mess of influences in my mind in the past few months. The idea that ET might be interdimensional. The idea that our reality is the product of multiple minds in a massive co-creation. And the meaning of idea of being human. 

There’s an old saying from my hippy days – We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a physical experience.

So, does being human sit on the spirit side the physical side? Is it a fusion of both? Strictly speaking it seems that human is physical in its original meaning – from humus, apparently. This means we have an essentially materialistic conception of being human – even if it has a religious foundation as well. In Christian terms human creation is certainly physical – red clay. But Genesis has two creations.  The first not being physical. Now I am not suggesting Genesis is history – just a story with complex themes. 

The alternative story is that we are incarnating spirits – essentially inter-dimensional beings whose presence in this physical world is anchored via our donning of an Earth suit. 

We become human when we are wearing our Earth suit. 

Evolutionary biology and psychology tell us useful things about our primate Earth suits. Just in case you struggle with this notion I’d like to remind you that tech geeks dream of creating smart clothing – perpetuating our passion to animate our creations. The idea of a living organic ‘suit’ is not utterly ridiculous. 

The thing about one’s Earth suit being homo sapiens is that it’s essential behaviour is reasonable consistent with our spiritual needs. The fit isn’t perfect – just a reasonable one. However, cognitive science suggests to some that our ‘stone-age’ primate minds are ill-suited to our ‘space-age’ circumstances. Looks like we might have to inject more ‘spirit’ into the flesh.

Another useful observation is that when we dress, we often signal identity. This is true especially when we put on uniforms. Advertisers know putting an actor in a lab coat will make them appear credible sources of ideas about a product. So, donning an Earth suit triggers an identification with others in their Earth suits.

My purpose here is to disrupt our habituated thinking, not to push an idea.

Why an Earth suit?

This question is often answered in myriad unsatisfactory ways that conform to dogmas rather than meet skeptical needs. 

Stewart Edward White, in the Unobstructed Universe. notes that the material physical experience is obstructed. In the spirit of time flying when we are having fun, being in one’s Earth suit isn’t fun. Time plays out relatively slowly. Buddhism talks of escaping desire and the wheel of rebirth – the aspiration to not feel it is necessary to don an Earth suit. Identification isn’t essential, though it might be compulsive.

Robert Monroe observed myriad spirits clamouring to enter the physical realm in order to experience ‘sensation’ in that slowed down state. Christianity echoes Buddhism in the sense of attending to the aspiration to escape desire and ignoble conduct. It also has a lot of guilt associated with its teachings. 

The consensus is that we are here in our Earth suits for ‘sensation’ but we become so immersed in that craving we lose track of our essential nature and purpose. We must redeem ourselves.

I think this is wrong headed. The Genesis story gives an explanation in a moral sense because doing so works psychologically – to a degree. Myth isn’t history. Stories serves purposes in context.

It’s all much more complex than that. The material physical reality is a medium of experience. It is one among many. Some argue we visit other non-material realms routinely. I can say only that I have had not many conscious experiences of such, and none have been evidentiary. Its hence only a plausible idea to me.

A useful parallel might be our relationship with water. Whether we dive, swim or sail there are ways of behaving that aren’t the same as being on dry land. There are skills and strengths that particular to the water medium and which are not directly translatable to dry land – but confer benefits which may be utilized on dry land. 

The point is that functioning in a radically different medium can be beneficial. In White’s sense water is more obstructive than air yet you can do things in water you can’t do in air – like float. 

It’s hard to answer a ‘why?’ question other than to observe that there seem to be multiple dimensions with their own characteristics. Material reality has attributes others don’t. So, if you want to be well rounded getting experience across the range of environments is advantageous. 

If what we understand about the necessity of sleep in relation to our psychological wellbeing it could be that we need to engage with non-physical realities to stay psychologically healthy. Hanging up our Earth suit and enjoying being naked might be something important?

We are focused on what we see through our Earth suit because that is sensible. If we are diving in water, it makes sense to concentrate on where we are rather than what’s going on in the air or on the ground – unless this is relevant to where we are. 

My point here to observe that how things are for us might be entirely ordinary from a certain perspective, but we have been induced to think in complex and mysterious ways that make it all so very elaborate. 

Shamans who go on spirit journeys have a singular ability which is remarkable to others, but this doesn’t mean that where they go is inherently remarkable. 

Likewise conscious OOBErs are relatively uncommon but that doesn’t mean the experience is itself remarkable or the places they go are inherently out of the ordinary. 

The mystification we are used to arises, I believe, for several reasons. 

The first is that the ability to have experiences in the non-physical realms may be limited in terms of personal capacity. The experience is non-ordinary rather than extraordinary. Natural, not supernatural. 

Second this politics of perception and social conformity. The difference between genuine shamans and ordained priests is that latter have the influence of the former upon a given population but not necessarily the capability. Hence the non-ordinary is subject to obfuscation to preserve influence and control that is not merited. 

The third resulting from the second, is there are social structures and discourses that benefit those seeking power. This power comes from elaborating on mysteries or denying them. Mystification is a power game intended to distract, deflect and deflate.

What is our environment?

What we can sense via our Earth suits is very limited relative to what is possible even on the physical plane. Other creatures use ultrasound, infrared or ultraviolet ranges of the spectrum of senses. Indeed, even a casual survey of capabilities of other Earth creatures reminds us that we function within a narrow band of sensory and other bodily capabilities. 

We make a big thing about people with other than normal abilities – intelligence, strength, speed, artistry and so on. 

Over the past half century or so we have become aware of how complex and interconnected our physical environment is. Other sciences are driving our sense of the complexity of reality deeper and deeper. 

Materialistic science insists that what is real is only what can be sensed, including via the mediation of technologies and intellect. Hence there’s a restriction on how our inquiry progresses.

Despite efforts to insist otherwise our religious foundations are soundly rooted in Earth suit experience. They claim authority over the non-physical which is not warranted. 

So, what is beyond the sensory Earth suit awareness? Our Earth suit bias extends our imagination into ‘outer space’ and the seemingly unfathomable dimensions of physical reality. We struggle with the notion of a quantum reality. But interdimensional realities are not on our menu of respectable options.

Human consciousness has always understood the presence of an ecology of lives inhabiting a non-material dimension. But this authoritative information is not part of our cultural narrative. This is despite an abundance of accounts of such extra-dimensional experiences going back to ancient times and richly in the present. 

This absence from our cultural narrative is recent, and primarily because neither religious nor materialistic authorities want to adapt to their inevitable loss of power should this wider dimensional reality become accepted as a cultural truth. 

If Earth ecology is any guide the non-physical dimensions are just as complex. This is a guess on my behalf based on research and experience. It is inferred rather than asserted as a fact.

What does interdimensional mean?

Let us allow that reality is inherently interdimensional. That is the physical is inherently entangled with the non-physical.  We might then be thinking in terms of awareness of what is, rather than what is in absolute terms. The full spectrum of realities exists whether we are aware of it or not.

The complexity of physical ecologies didn’t emerge because we became aware of it. It was there all along. We are becoming more aware of that complexity partly through advances in science and partly through changes in attitude.

Shamans, OOBErs, and evidence from non-physical agents provide at least fundamental evidence of the interdimensionality of our reality. It is basic, at least at a public level. Who knows how sophisticated it is in private.

The idea that ET is interdimensional can provide us with the idea of an unsensed elsewhere – but not as though this suggests a vastness of nothing between our here and that unsensed elsewhere. It could rather be a vastness of complexity – such as exists between Sydney and Paris.

Conclusion

I have no doubt that interdimensional interaction is going to become more apparent, but how long before it becomes part of our normal cultural discourse isn’t something I can’t guess at with any confidence.

We have natural habits of editing out thoughts that don’t fit our expectations. We have all had intuitions we dismissed when they arose in our awareness, only to be later confirmed experientially.

Part of that habit of dismissing awarenesses is how we frame ideas, and the language we use. We can act to fix habits of mind and accidentally activate denial when we what we intended was doubt. What we need is curiosity unencumbered habituated thinking.

I have lived with a steady stream of confirmation of a complex interdimensional reality since childhood, and even so I have been captured by our sticky cultural discourse. This has led me to wrongly imagine there are separated fixed categories of experience. It’s been only the past few years that I have been thinking in terms of ordinary and non-ordinary rather than categories like spiritual, occult, or esoteric.

Interdimensionality is our birthright. It was once normal and still is in some cultures. We are interdimensional beings. Our bodies, our Earth suits, are our vehicles of manifestation on the material plane. Our attention is focused here, through those Earth suits when we are awake and active. When we are asleep, not so much.

We exclude interdimensional awareness mostly because we are told it isn’t real or isn’t a good thing to do. It is real and it is something we engage in to some degree naturally. There are hazards, of course, if we indulge recklessly or excessively.

My argument here is to think differently about it and don’t censor awareness reflexively. Choose freely, and wisely. 

Introduction

The passions of the past 3 or 4 years as articulated in social media especially have obliged me to reimagine the basis of relating and communicating. 

A few years ago I was an active participate in a forum created by the Skeptiko podcast but quit with a few allies after the culture of the forum deteriorated beyond our capacity for tolerance. For me it became a place where aggressive intolerant and dogmatic participants were given free reign and assertive and offensive counters to reasonable statements were deemed appropriate. At least that was my take on it, in company with a lot of other folks.

One of those allies went on to be involved in the creation of Psience Quest [PQ] – an alternative forum which attracted other Skeptiko refugees. They reflected on the motives of the founders of the new forum saying, “We set up PQ to safeguard the community, putting its future into our own hands, and taking it out of the hands of a singular, capricious host.”

The idea that a community needed protecting isn’t novel, it’s just rare to see it working out.

Social media seemed to have so much promise as an opportunity for a collaborative sharing of ideas but it seems to have become an amplifier of our baser reflexes and a stalking ground for predators. I have largely quit social media in deep disappointment. My X/Twitter account has languished unused for over a decade. My Facebook account is likewise abandoned. I have no compelling reason yet to kill either account. 

I have retained Linked-In for professional reasons, but it’s hardly more than a kind social network with job ads these days. 

Last year I read several books on X/Twitter and the problems of social media. The vociferous champions of free speech aggressively assert their rights to lie, mislead, insult and abuse. 

I am not averse to a right to free speech, but I think it comes with responsibilities. These include civility and honesty.

I know a lot of what happened on the Skeptiko forum was down to folks sitting down at their computer and getting steadily drunker. Angry drunks get ruder as they drink. But happy drunks don’t – they just get infuriatingly reasonable – a red rag to an angry drunk’s bull.

Social media has simply concentrated and magnified an existing problem. Our culture has determined that what we think and believe is a contest, rather than a collaboration. We are habituated to the zero-sum game of right or wrong.

This is, I believe psychologically immature – and its time we grew up. 

Having said this, let me assure the reader that I see myself as having only begun the business of growing up.

What is going on?

I believe free speech is vital – but in some communities its exercise has grated against my sensibilities.  I have a bias toward speech that is truthful and respectful – exploratory rather than assertive. And I have a bias toward people who are self-reflective, thoughtful, and not impelled by arrogance or anger – or a compulsion to be right. 

What is true or right isn’t as clear cut as we often think. Certainty at a personal level does not always translate to certainty shared by all members of a community. 

We know this in our families. The psychology of in-groups and out-groups is such that we give far greater latitude to in-group members. We assert that out-group members are wrong in so many ways.

Sometimes it isn’t that an idea is the dealbreaker of a relationship so much as the attitude that accompanies it. We sometimes don’t even bother to assess the integrity of an idea because its mere assertion militates against what we believe to be true – regardless of whether we have assessed that belief against data and reasoned thought.

We frame arguments to defend a belief in ways that serve our needs, rather than tailor them to reasonably convince our audience. And when they are not persuaded, we are certain that this because of their deficits in mentality and integrity, and certainly not in our arguments or the belief they are intended to bolster.

After several years of thinking about belief I concluded that it comes down to what we imagine to be true and then we construct social and intellectual props to support that assertion.

Recently my inquiry into cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology has given me confidence I am least in the right ballpark.

If we don’t understand how and why we form beliefs, we will not escape from the sense that they are fundamental to our sense of being and meaning and hence must be defended with an existential zeal.

In our evolution we lived in communities where shared beliefs and values were critical to our survival. These days we still do need shared beliefs and values to craft a workable society – but at nowhere the level that was once necessary. Now we can accommodate a far wider, more diverse, set of beliefs about the meaning of life etc. We live in complex, pluralistic and diverse communities and yet the essential mechanisms of living together work tolerably well. I was advised many years ago to marvel that things work as well as they do, rather than lament the manifold manifest deficits in our conception and practice. 

I constantly remind myself of the wise words of Tom Peters, a ‘management guru’ I first encountered in the late 1980s. He said that we lived in a ‘sloppy and messy’ world. This,  I subsequently discovered, was an unexpectedly eloquent [but hardly elegant] description of reality – deeply complex and malleable – but with crunchy bits that attract sentiments of certainty. 

Contestation has value in aspects of our lives. However, misinterpretation of evolution has led some to believe that competition is the pervasive and dominant impulse in nature. It isn’t. Interdependence is the norm. Competition functions under the umbrella of interdependence – the crunchy bits.

Kuhn’s lament that science’s progress is only possible one funeral at a time is telling. It makes me wonder how much more progress might have been made if our dominant actors on our cultural stage had been more psychologically mature and less inclined to assert their particular beliefs. It’s as if there is a paradox at play. The passion and determination to rise to the top of one’s field often requires the fuel of egotism – and this becomes part of the colour of success. Combatting egos fool us into believing they model how to do things. Observers of our primate cousins note that alpha males aren’t leaders in any sensible sense – they are just dominant. We can see that in our culture that dominant egos have sold us the lie that they are leaders. We are beginning also to see that their egotistical chest thumping has led us into a perilous cul-de-sac.

Frank and fearless

My long time in the public sector made me accustomed to being expected to offer frank and fearless advice – which I tried to honour. It was expected my advice would be well-informed, accurate, clear, and respectful. But the reality was that it was often not received in a reciprocating spirit. And advice I was given occasionally was neither frank nor fearless – and often wrong and biased. I learned to carefully double check advice from some sources. 

The ideal was fine, but, as with many ideals, living up to it was compromised by human impulses unconsciously obeyed. It doesn’t take too deep a dive into psychology to grasp that we deceive ourselves and others routinely. This isn’t out of any malign spirit. We simply have reflexes that have evolved to serve our needs – but in settings very unlike what live in now.

The ideal and reality don’t mesh neatly. Frank and fearless advice has theoretical merits. But if that ideal is applied injudiciously in the real world, it can and will lead to trouble. A person who now is a good friend was a member of a team I led. One day a director approached me to advise that I should speak to my team member who they assessed to be ‘unreliable’ in meetings. They had dared ask questions which put the director and other leaders on the spot. The questions were entirely sensible. But they also violated the unspoken code of not embarrassing leaders.

So, we had a chat about what happens when intelligence and integrity encounters presumptions of prowess based entirely on position. We had to learn how to candy-coat the truth to power if we wanted to deliver good outcomes for the community we served and survive.

Raw idealism does not work.

Competition vs Cooperation

For a very long time, since the adoption of Darwin’s theory at least, we have been persuaded that competition is the norm in the living world. But science has been unpicking that fabric for decades. Ecologies do have a natural element of competition, but within a far greater impulse to cooperate and be interdependent.

I grew up playing games – cricket, soccer, Aussie rules, chess, Monopoly, Ludo, darts, so many card games, and pool. I also played elaborate war games that lasted several days. In each game competition was essential – but only within a structure of rules and compliance with them. Ill-disciplined competition in the form of cheating was not okay.

I am grateful for the life lessons game playing taught me. I learned to analyze situations, assess people, think strategically and bide my time.

We are told that a certain amount of stress is good for us, indeed it is essential for our well-being. It is very much like competition. Game playing is possible only because of the rules. We can use games to test ourselves or to dominate others – and if domination is our goal, we will try to have the rules favour us. You can see where this might go if the urge to compete is pathological.

What we are learning more and more via science and more mature thinking is that our reality is a complex of interdependencies and collaborations in which competition is a nuanced but necessary flavor.

Why does any of this matter in a spiritual sense

I started to write this on 21 January 2025, the day before my birthday and the anniversary of my mum’s death – an interesting timing that has been elegantly revolutionary over the past 27 years. It has routinely plunged me into deep thought. On the first anniversary my mother’s spirit visited me and gave me a gift of an understanding that transformed my life. This year that reflective period continued into February.

There are already signs that this year is going bring transformational developments that going to change the way many will think about their lives. But those developments can shift us into transcending the impulse to contest what is real and good and true or tip us into full on conflict. There’s no point in saying that ‘we have a choice’ if we don’t know how to exercise it. And it’s going to be less likely we will take the opportunity to find out how to do so if the climate of aggressive assertion of the right to lie, mislead and insult is perpetuated.

The choice we have is to decide whether we are predominantly competitors or collaborators. Even deciding we are predominantly collaborators isn’t enough because we have likely imbibed a lifetime of culturally conditioned competition habits. Deconditioning ourselves is a big and long job. Being aware is an essential beginning though.

Let me put this in context. Today I found 2 sources of ideas that I tapped into in the past few days converging. I started listening to a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes yesterday and watching some recent UFO/ET videos as well. The content of both sources resonated with ideas from David R. Samson’s Our Tribal Future. Samson is an evolutionary anthropologist who observes that our innate psychological reflexes are mismatched against our current social reality and that we need to do intentional work to speedily adapt those reflexes to how things are now.

It’s not that we are doing anything wrong, just that we are lagging behind where we need to be in our adaptation if we want to achieve the outcomes that we desire without more widespread suffering than seems presently likely.

I am a fan of that idea that critical change is achieved one funeral at a time. Younger generations imbibe the new values that are generated by cultural change activists. I can see this happening in my own family. It’s not a smooth transition but the difference in outlook between my parents and my nieces and nephews, and my grandson is stark.

But those changes have happened only because the cultural change activists have undertaken intentional efforts to evolve how they think and believe. Neuroscience tells us that such change is demanding. In the storm of our personal lives the extra cognitive effort to refine our perceptions and feelings is a cost we must pay.

We all know this is true. Keeping new year’s resolutions, breaking habits, sticking to diets, or adopting and following a new belief set all demand cognitive [emotional and intellectual] effort to change how we are to how we want to be. It isn’t easy, but the change won’t happen without the effort. 

For the past 20 months or so I have been responding to an inner urge to think and write on the theme of the future of human spirituality. I wondered whether it was necessary to sayhuman spirituality – and apparently it is. The reason is dawning on me slowly as I find myself drawn to books on the evolution of the biology of our behaviour. This isn’t an area many people with an abiding interest matters spiritual have bothered with. The doggedly materialistic voice that has dominated science has made such curiosity seem pointless from a spiritual perspective.

But things have changed. The newer generations of scientists may be influenced by materialism, but they haven’t grown up loyal to it and they are not cowed by it. They are asking more subtle questions and finding equally subtle responses.

A few days ago, I watched a YouTube video earnestly discussing a biblical text said to be at least 3,000 years old. Why? Why invest so much energy into a text whose actual content had nothing of meaning to say to us? It seemed to me that this was a fusion of game playing and displacement activity. It had value only in the context of the group of people who have a passion for this hobby.

Where we finding meaning about the challenges and opportunities ahead of us matters. I have spent decades seeking insight in sources from the past. This has been an immensely rewarding pursuit and I still engage in it, but to a far lesser degree. 

What seems now a better application of effort is exploring current knowledge – of which there is such an abundance. Little of this knowledge is expressed in ways that satisfy the needs of a spiritual quester, so there’s a job to be done.

My growing interest concerns what it means to be human. It is a question that has become enticingly difficult to answer with any real clarity. I want to craft my own answer because I do believe that we will share an awareness of those we presently call ET in the not very distant future – and I want to be psychologically prepared for that. I presently think ET is interdimensional and their open arrival will transform how we must think about our reality.

In a recent audiobook or podcast there was a fleeting reference to a claimed statement from the Buddha about how reality was woven from the interlacing of the consciousnesses of many lives. That claim sent me off on a fascinating reverie, hence I am no longer sure where it came from.

This is, of course, a very animistic thing but the version I am more familiar with says that ‘we’ create reality with our minds. The ‘we’ here is taken to mean only humans. We are privileging ourselves as creators rather than contributors. We see ourselves major and even dominant players when, in the scheme of things, we may be only players of lesser roles and not the stars of the show.

In the biblical drama humans are the stars on the earthly stage. In a desert setting that might be fair enough. But that’s not the case for forest and jungle dwellers. We have framed our sense of being human on the tales from arid lands and I don’t think that will serve us well when we have to adapt to interdimensional visitation – and discover we live in a multidimensional forest and not a spatial wilderness.

Conclusion

I think we have a lot of hard work to do to reimagine what it is to be human. The mindset of competition being the dominant logic of life has permeated our culture. Our religious roots lie in a zero-sum soil that has been aggressively competitive – there is only one God, to whom all is subject, and we have the exclusive say on how that plays out. 

We are heirs to this mentality, and it saturates and influences us whether we like it or not. This influence goes to our core and just rejecting the language and cultural practices is only a good first step. It isn’t sufficient.

I am not saying it’s all bad. There have been powerful evolutionary impulses for good expressed through our religions, but they remain entangled in historic tribal contexts that do not suit where we are and where we must go. There’s good evidence that western cultures are abandoning institutional religions in favour of DIY spirituality or atheism and materialism. But, as with any desirable trend, it can be boosted by intentional effort.

This effort is about going in the desired direction and not about arguing whether a particular path that suits somebody’s needs is right or wrong for other people. Ultimately what we believe serves our psychological needs, so the fact that what we believe doesn’t serve somebody else’s psychological needs isn’t important. But what is important is that this is understood.

There aren’t right or wrong spiritual beliefs. Some may be unhealthy and even toxic – reflecting a vulnerable psychological state which resonates with them. The risk of predation by promoters of such beliefs upon those vulnerable to manipulation is another matter.

Beliefs may also be expressed using assertions of objective factuality that are either not supported or contradicted by data. That’s fair game in terms of disputing such claims. However, this is something that requires discipline and sensibility. Some atheists love engaging with Christians who see the Bible as a source of literal truth. But to what good end? If the engagement also denigrates their faith and their sense of identity the exercise can become a form of bullying.

In Our Tribal Future Samson observes that members of an in-group will sacrifice truth for myth because identity and shared membership are more important than relying on data and objective truth.

We all make metaphysical guesses about what we believe is good and true and real. Materialists are sincere in their beliefs and constantly demonstrate a willingness to not follow the data – lest their identity and membership of a valued group becomes untenable.

If we look closely at our own conduct, we will maybe discover that we all sacrifice truth for belonging and identity to some degree. It’s what humans do.

We are used to thinking we are the smartest critter on the planet and when we meet with ET it will be a meeting with peers. It won’t be. I have encountered a non-human intelligence, and the comparison is not even toddler to adult. We are in for a profound surprise which may translate into shock and even existential trauma of the kind experienced by indigenous people upon the arrival of white people.

As we discover interdependency and cooperation are more widespread that we assumed we can surrender to that truth – or we can cling to our culturally conditioned beliefs and our familiar sense of identity.

A list of resources

These are only books I have come across, and which have inspired me. So, the list is neither exhaustive nor proscriptive. I urge the reader to be open and curious. 

I read kindle books which I can put on my phone, and I listen to lots audiobooks because I can ‘read’ while I am doing other things. I am often told there’s no time to read much. That really isn’t true – it’s about what we choose to do with our time. I used to commute to work – 1 hour door-to-door each way. That was 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week that was available to me. The question is what we are motivated to do with the time we have. We will make the time available that we think we need. Reading isn’t a competition. It’s a collaboration with our own inner life.

• Biology and Human Behaviours:                     
• The Neurological Origins of Individuality by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec and Nick Estes
• A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
• The Power of Us by J.V. Van Bavel & D. J. Packer
• Imminent by Luis Elizondo
• A New Science of the Afterlife by Daniel Drasin
• Tribal by Michael Morris
• The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
• The Soul by Paul Ham
• The Golden Road by William Dalrymple
• Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology by Justin L. Barrett
• Thriving with Stone-Age Minds by Justin L. Barrett   & Pamela Ebstyne King
• Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
• The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger
• Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano
• Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson
• The Telepathy Tapes – a podcast with Ky Dickens
• The Monroe Institute – YouTube Channel
• NDE The Other Side – YouTube Channel
• Ideas – CBC podcast
• To the Best of Our Knowledge – Wisconsin Public Radio

Introduction

Over 2024 I did extensive research on Diversity Equity & Inclusion [DEI] for some work I am doing. It’s an area I think is poorly understood, so I went down to the basics – evolutionary biology and psychology and cognitive science. At the same time, I continued my interest in UFOs, the nature of religion, and the politics of religious belief. 

For a while this seemed like a strangely disconnected mix – but then it started to flow together. I was listening to an audiobook by Suzanne Simard [Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest] and paused to listened to an intriguing Monroe Institute recording I found of YouTube – How and Why an ET is Communicating with Humans #39. 

Finding the Mother Tree described how a forest was interwoven with fungal connections and how trees might choose to favour kin and other members of the plant community in different ways. As Simard put it – a mother tree supported its off-spring but also nourished the plant community around them. The Monroe Institute recording concerned a person who in a state of altered consciousness had contacted an entity in a UFO. This entity was making itself available to humans – preparing them for greater awareness of the community in which we live – an interdimensional one. 

Below I try to make sense of these inputs as 2025 begins – and in the context of how we might best respond to the challenges ahead of us.

On relationships and utility

One of the themes of Finding the Mother Tree is that forestry practices which see trees as separate objects to be exploited do not, and resist, seeing trees as living agents. They are things, not beings.

I am listening to an introductory course on cognitive science which is currently discussing how our brain categorizes living beings using sensory attributes and non-living things using functional attributes. We can see how our materialism has also categorized living beings as functional objects [think of the term living things]. That takes an act of dislocation and removal from our natural empathy with living agents. When we objectify living beings to use them as merely functional things we engage in a process of identity creation that intentionally sets us apart from other living beings. 

This separation seems to have been first articulated for our culture in Genesis 1:26 – Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominionover the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

And in Gensis 1:28 we have – “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Some commentators see dominion in this context as stewardship. But it is more often taken as a permission-giver for control instead of an assertion of responsibility to act as a steward. My OED app defines dominion as “sovereignty or control: man’s attempt to establish dominion over nature.” Indeed Genesis 1:28 also talks of subduing the earth.

The Genesis statement implicitly assumes humans were granted the power to exert influence that impacts the lives of creatures. This has proven to be the case – mostly via objectification, and so often for ill. 

This idea that humans were granted power over other lives is a kind of privileging exceptionalism that seems to set the Abrahamic tradition apart. There may be other cultures will a similar conceit, but I am not aware of them. Add to this the fact that Christians also colonized the Jewish belief that they are a chosen people, and we find at the core of our culture a certain arrogance that remains even when the faith has been abandoned. This is reflected in the immodest name – Homo Sapiens – wise man. Clever yes, but wise?

Genesis was written when tribal impulses were dominant and the imperative to include/exclude ruled – and for good reason. I don’t think the OT could have been written in a forest or a jungle where the interplay of lives is rampant and more intimately interdependent. In an arid environment where the demarcation between abundance and scarcity is stark the separation from fellow feeling is easier to create and justify. In such communities herding becomes necessary to ensure ongoing access to food. The animal becomes an object – property, and the source of wealth and social power. Such an environment also dictates whether to stay in one place or move. 

I think our culture is predicated upon the imperatives of the herder. Separation into in-groups [our tribe] and out-groups [other tribes] is more extreme in harsh setting where critical resources are scarce. Competition seems natural and necessary. Under such circumstances relationships with living beings can be dominated by a sense of utility. In Genesis we must remember that Adam and Eve were evicted from the abundance of Eden [a garden, and like a forest or a jungle] into a harsh world of scarcity and travail.

The Eden myth has, like the rest of the OT shaped our culture, and we are living in that legacy, now ingrained as a cultural habit of mind. We must remember that rationalism and materialism arose out of Christianity. And though they rejected its dogma they were emotionally shaped by it. Simard’s struggle against Canadian foresting policies makes it clear that even in the first decade of the current century the ‘rational’ mindset of seeing trees as separate organic objects to be used to satisfy human need was still deeply entrenched. The Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest was an alien notion, treated with disdain by rational folks.

Simard’s research countered conventional beliefs that forests were crafted from competition. She found that while there was some degree of competition it was communality, cooperation, and interdependence that was the rule. 

Here’s the point. Objectification and exploitation are valid only if competition is the dominant norm. This is how our culture has been tuned – via our tribal reflexes and our herder religious beliefs. Simard is only one of many scientists who are showing that cooperation, and interdependence are the norm in the natural world. Yes, predation and competition are an integral part of the reality – just not dominant.  

There is an alignment between our spiritual and moral intuitions and the natural order. We seek communities that are supportive and collaborative while accepting that competition has its place and predation is an ‘evil’ we need to guard against.

Flipping the cross

The ET in the Monroe Institute audio talks of how life in the cosmos tends toward connection – a conscious sense of community. This is, apparently, where we are heading. But if that’s the case we must evolve beyond our cultural and biological reflexes that currently favour separation and utility. 

Many years ago, I did a deep dive into communication with non-physical agents. In fact, most of my most valued idea sources are from humans no longer in physical bodies. My way of organising this idea has been to imagine a cross. The horizontal arm is our space-time material dimension. The vertical arm is the interdimensional [the non-physical]. This arrangement privileges the horizontal – for understandable reasons. As a conscious agent in an organic body the necessity of preserving that body and the sense of self that is generated requires attention to the physical world. But now I want to flip that. 

Verticality implies gravity and hence difficulty. But taking an idea from Stewart Edward White’s The Unobstructed Universe it is the material dimension that is difficult – obstructed. Space and time exist only because of obstruction. The Monroe Institute ET says they do not dwell in space or time. The non-material has different attributes. White describes these attributes as receptivity [time], conductivity [space] and frequency [motion]. 

Here’s the interesting thing for me. Interdimensional awareness begins with a sense of interconnectedness. In the forest there is the ‘Wood-wide web’ which invisibly connects plants. The Monroe Institute ET refers to a sense of community – a connection across seeming boundaries – though these are cognitive only, rather than actual. This interconnectivity can be experienced intentionally or unintentionally [as I discovered repeatedly since childhood]. 

It is also something we crave. In our organic condition we humans are deeply communal. We need to belong, to be connected and accepted. This is reflected in animistic cultures in terms of living in the world. It is further reflected in our religious ideals. Connection is vital at every level. It’s such a pity that we have injected the tribal impulse and illusions of special privilege and exceptionalism that trigger separation and exclusion at the religious level.

Materialism has denied the existence of interdimensional connectivity and community because the fact of it isn’t apparent to the cognitive habits of its adherents – and there’s an existing cultural narrative which favours utility and separation. Why discard something that is profitable and familiar, and which also seems to offer existential certainty and safety? Separation and objectification aren’t a viable long-term strategy for flourishing in a spirit of connection and inclusion.

If we can change our thinking to make interdimensional awareness our horizontal norm and material experience our more difficult vertical aspect of experience, we might be able to realign our consciousness with what is a more natural orientation.

A clue this might be ‘natural’ comes from our hunter gather animistic ancestors living in environments of abundance. Another clue arises from Star Trek, 2^nd gen where people live in a culture where all have their material needs met. This gives citizen the ‘leisure’ to cultivate their inner lives. 

The Protestant work ethic does not apply. The assertion that idle hands do the Devil’s work is not universally applicable. Being in the physical world is an unavoidable fact of human life but it doesn’t have to dominate. There’s that well-known phrase – being in the world but not of the world. 

These days we can enter cyberspace via gaming and find that maintaining our physical bodies is a distracting chore. In fact, we now struggle to exercise and have special places to get and stay fit. We are more focused in non-material and abstract realms – computers and other digital devices. Our efforts are less directed to events in the physical world and more imaginary, emotional or mental. In a similar vein we are less connected with the natural world and more involved in the human-made or human-modified. Our technologies have transformed our relationships with time, space and gravity. While none of these transformations are complete the trend is evident.

In short not a lot of what we are creating or causing is conducive to the organic/physical aspect of our reality. It is as if we are driven to favour the non-physical – the metaphysical.

Buddhism was developed around the 5^th century BCE and taught detachment from the physical world via not focusing upon its delights and worries. There are life paths that celebrate spirit over matter prioritizing the cultivation an inner life – through contemplation, compassionate service, art, music, literature or learning. This might be no more than paddling on the shore of a vast interdimensional ocean. Collectively we may just be getting our feet wet.

Throughout human history there have been those who have travelled further from the shore – shamans, yogis, mystics, and sojourners out of the body. And there have been travelers from interdimensional elsewheres who have traveled here – and still do.

Most of us have little conscious awareness of the ecology of lives and the community of friends and allies that dwell on the other side of an obscuring veil. Historically Christianity set out to deny or denigrate any spirit not sanctioned by the faith. Later, materialism insisted that the sensing of any agency that could not be seen or poked was either error, stupid gullibility, or madness.  Never mind that human history is a rich testimony to the abundance of life in other dimensions as well as this one.

This sorry culture has led to the saddest question any being could utter – “Are we alone in the universe?” It has also led to the bizarre conceit that we are the most intelligent critter in the neighbourhood. But that’s only because we haven’t met our neighbours – who we don’t think exist.

Fortunately, we are slowly flipping the cross. At least there’s progress.

Adapting our minds

David R. Samson, in Our Tribal Future argues that our tribal reflexes [the Tribe Drive – what Justin L. Barrett called our stone-age mind in Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology] must be reshaped to meet our needs in the world we have created. 

In certain ways our current culture in the west has evolved from not just tribal origins but also desert-determined senses of separation and utility. So, it’s a double challenge we face. Samson says that we are hampered by an evolutionary lag – we adapt to what was, not what is. The rate of change in the past two millennia [and even the past 2 centuries] is beyond our capacity to adapt reflexively. Now we must adapt intentionally – with effort, intent and self-discipline. 

What neuroscience tells us is that doing this is hard work, so we need to have formulated a high level of motivation. I particularly like the work of the Neuroleadership Institute [NLI] because it works with organisations to change workplace behaviours based on neuroscience research.

Here I think motivation might need clarification. NLI tells us that we move away from threats, and we move toward rewards. But we know, as we have seen with climate change, that we can ‘rationalise’ threats away and become passive toward rewards – especially if we imagine that we might lose something. The reward of weight loss, for example, gets tangled up in the loss of favoured foods.

Maybe we need a higher motive than self-interest? There’s a lot to think through. Collectively we resist what seem like desirable changes and seem to prefer older, less enlightened ways.

I have recently discovered Cognitive Science. It’s been around for some time but now its spoken about more and there are some accessible resources for those who want to get an idea of what its about. I am listening to an audiobook – Introduction to Cognitive Science by Thad A. Polk & The Great Courses. I encourage the reader to explore this emerging discipline.

Cognitive science seems like a very useful field to help us reframe our notions of being human, based on science, rather than theology or philosophy, or causal speculation.

Belief and Inquiry

After a couple of years wondering what belief is, I settled on – belief is what we imagine to be true to meet our psychological needs. When we say we think we are often faming what we imagine in what seems to us to rational terms. Belief seems to me to be far more about what we feel and imagine – and we say we think because this dignifies our responses in terms of what we most esteem.

We repeat Descartes’ famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ without wondering whether it might be more accurate to say, ‘I feel, therefore I am’ or ‘I imagine, therefore I am’. Why privilege thinking beyond the fact that it’s a conceit we grant ourselves? Thought has long been deemed the purer faculty. So much so that we denigrated emotions as fit only for women and children. This unbalanced attitude is still dominant in key areas, but its grip is fading – funeral by funeral. 

Our psychological needs are drawn from what we bring with us into this life, and what we experience here. They combine spiritual and biological factors. Self-awareness and insight are very difficult to get. Even those who dedicate their lives to the spiritual path are often tempted into unbecoming conduct. Consequently, it is hard to know whether one’s beliefs are not partly forms of unconscious self-deception. Still, we can only do the best we can.

Can we engage in inquiry that is not constrained and shaped by our beliefs? True scepticism maintains a constant spirit of doubt. If this is bolstered by curiosity we can maybe not be captured by our beliefs and be able to find new thoughts. Of course, we are all subject to that human bias to imagine we are smarter than we really are.

The point here is that our tribal stone-age mind’s propensity to trigger a desire for inclusion of people we favour and exclusion of people who trouble us remains potent. Conditioning by our culture, what we bring with us into this life, and how our life experiences shape our interests and motives makes it hard to change to the degree to which is desired or desirable.

While Samson might be right in asserting our tribal reflexes represent an existential threat, figuring out what to do about it isn’t that easy. The easy path is to glibly say we should do this or that. But we could be doing this or that with ill-prepared instruments.

We are space-age people dominated by stone-age minds. Our tribal reflexes permeate our religions and our secular ‘thinking’.  Making the evolutionary leap into a modified tribalism better suited to our times will be neither easy nor uniform. 

What seems to me to be certain is that what we believe in the future must be post tribal behaviour 1.0 [which gave us many of our religions, science thinking, and cultural values]. What the 2.0 version will look like isn’t something I can’t yet imagine.

Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology offer useful ideas on belief but because I accept the spiritual dimension I need to add elements. Until somebody writes a book on spirituality and belief that incorporates our best scientific knowledge, we will have to engage in DYI projects in pursuit of our own objectives. That can be fun, so long as we don’t end up fooling ourselves by being too modest in our goals – or too biased against science.

Conclusion

I can see a convergence of science, psychology and spiritual imagination toward the development of a coherent narrative that can meet our needs for a contemporary spirituality. But the elements are scattered across disciplines and fields of inquiry and application. Its like a massive jigsaw puzzle that requires many players to work together. However, it’s more like a great pile of tiny mosaic tiles with which we must not only collaborate in putting the picture together but also imagine what picture is.

The idea that we must collaborate to create an understanding isn’t novel. Its just not something readily recognised in religious or spiritual circles as a normal thing. We are so used to competing evangelicals [of many traditions] insisting on the supremacy of their path that has uniquely valid sanction from the divine that we imagine this contestation is the norm. It isn’t always the case. 

Sensible folks have shared the adventure since time immemorial. These days there are scholars of religion who share their passion freely. Jeffrey Kripal is one of my favourites. Sadly, publication of works by scholars is controlled by publishers who think that academics write only for other academics and students.

As I am writing I paused to do a search on Amazon. I put in ‘contemporary religion’ and found On the Mystery of Being: Contemporary Insights on the Convergence of Science and Spirituality by Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo as an audiobook. It has a rating of 4.4 [89% of 4 or 5 stars]. I bought that.

Our future is looking challenging at least. Astrologers seem to agree that maybe the next 7 years are going to be transformative for us all. Others, from different fields, agree. Climate change, other ecological factors, AI, and social media are headline concerns with a host of other matters demanding attention. And then there’s ET. 

In evolutionary terms our ecological niche seems to be in for a shake-up. Adapting will not be easy. But we can be better prepared in our own hearts and minds if we care to.

There is an abundance of ideas that can guide and inspire us, but they can’t be selected from a catalogue of great ideas. You have to go looking for them and be prepared to assemble promising notions into what can evolve into a coherent vision. This isn’t a solitary endeavour. You need companions, fellow travellers.

We are not alone.

Introduction

I finished Paul Ham’s The Soul: A History of the Human Mind nearly 2 weeks ago and I am still processing my reactions. I don’t agree with Ham on several interpretations but as a survey of the human soul/mind the book is stupendous in its embrace. It is a history, not a theology.

Below is me processing what I got from engaging with the book.

What we believe

Belief is, I think, distilled in the imagination and then expressed as ideas – as art, as ritual, as dogma. We seek to meet our psychological needs through our beliefs. And so much depends upon whether we are psychologically healthy or not. Also, a lot depends upon our relative state of psychological maturity.

When I finished the book, I felt a bit stunned. The survey of the psychology of some believers left me aghast. It wasn’t that this was news to me, just that the scope was laid out so starkly, so copiously.

The book understandably has a strong focus on religious traditions, but includes philosophy, psychology and AI. The religious traditions are shaped by the psychology of the adherents and believers. People like Dawkins who blame religion have, I think, a poor understanding of what religion is.

Ham asserts that the gods are invented by humans – which is kind of true in that we describe the divine according to our capacity to apprehend it – and then assert that our description is a rendering of an objective reality. However, this is by no means a universal approach. What we choose to believe depends on what we need and our capacity to be aware of the nature of that need.

Belief and morality

We edit what a faith founder said. For instance, many words and ideas have been put into the mouth of Jesus by those writing in support of his mission. It could be fairly argued that Jesus, like the Buddha, delivered a simple but challenging message, which, if taken at face value, would defeat many adherents. Hence Christianity adopted the Jewish tradition – colonised it in fact – so it had a rich resource of God-sanctified outrages to rely upon. A follower could be both faithful and an abuser with no difficulty.

Christians and Buddhists can choose a purist approach – a deeply challenging path of self-awareness. That’s not for everybody. Or they can elect a path of graduated expose to truths and challenges that serves their psychological needs. But that path will also be crafted to attract their interest and commitment, and may include financial, social and political benefits for those who do the crafting.

As a result, moral codes will be designed to meet the needs of all involved. I was interested in the discussion as to whether spiritual salvation depended on works or faith. It can seem like a strange debate to have. Acts of loving kindness don’t stack up against a person who has accepted Jesus as their saviour, but who is neither kind nor loving to many – beyond those in their in-group. And even then they can be cruel to members of their in-group in their faith’s name.

The idea that spiritual salvation is conditional upon accepting and adhering to a theological dogma appeals to many. That’s an interesting barrier to place between a person and their own connection with the divine. Its an effort to control that connection and shape it to conform to the demands of a dogma.

My question is, “What is the psychological need of a person who is committed to exerting that kind of control?” How do they frame their moral argument to justify that choice – to themselves and to others?

It seems that when a spiritual philosophy changes from being a personal pursuit to cultural movement other factors are activated, and these modify how that philosophy is understood and followed. The colonisation of Judaism by Christianity effectively transformed a personal spiritual philosophy into a cultural mechanism which diluted the potency of personal commitment to the original philosophy. What was created accommodated pragmatism, distortion, and corruption – as happens with all scaled up cultural processes.

We are not dealing with something inherent in religion in isolation from other forms cultural activity. We are dealing with something inherent in ourselves and in our cultures. I can now recognise the same problem arising in the public sector – after a career spanning 5 decades.

Just what is religion?

Ham says, briefly, that our ancestors responded to their dawning existential awareness with fear. That’s an attractive argument reinforced by anthropologists. But I think it’s just wrong.

Fear is a sensible response to many things which are a genuine source of peril. Staying alive in one’s organic body is an imperative impulse we mostly have to a good degree. But we are not naturally dominated by fear. It is one colour on the palette of human emotions.

My inquiry into animism [2002 to 2009] convinced me of several things:

• Our ancestors did not have the binary distinction of living vs inert. They were, I think, biased toward seeing reality as a ‘thou’ rather than an ‘it’. We have superimposed that duality upon human perception with the bias favouring ‘itness’.
• Our ancestor’s awareness of ‘reality’ included what we’d call extra-sensory perceptions. But we have no realistic idea of what, or how, they perceived the reality around them. But we do know they had beliefs in spirits – which might suggest this was because they engaged with them. The widespread belief, now, is that they were mistaken – because spirits are not real.
• They made a sensible decision to pragmatically engage with the agencies whose presence impinged upon them in both the physical and metaphysical sense. This was done at a communal level, and it would have included all the elements familiar in magical practice and rituals many of us recognise as elements of religion.

The great difficulty we have these days is that we are attuned to our dominant environmental factors. We are bombarded by stimuli, we are pressured to conform to social norms, and our physical being in the world is relentlessly mediated and modified by our own technologies and human-made environments.

We have no idea how our ancestors operated. Our filters process data that comes to us from people who still live in what we’d see as ‘uncivilised’ ways and generate a bias and hubris in favour of our way of knowing. We hold the idea of civilisation as a necessary and desired state for all humans.

Religion is an idea developed by Europeans between the start of the 16^th and the end of the 17^th centuries. Its an idea that sits firmly in our minds to describe how cultures organised to deal with the spectrum of experiences which impacted them – where God is concerned. Non-God related experiences are described in other, secular, terms – and dominated by materialism.

I will use the term religion because no other alternative term is available. If we understand that it is a modern term, maybe the only alternative is the idea of ‘life’ in which gods and spirits were sensed to play an active role. 

In this sense religion is an effort to make sense of being in the world using the tools at hand. Our transition into materialism arose, I think, from the debasement/complication of religion. As it became more a matter of social influence in service of those disposed to favour faith, dogma, order, and conformity over loving kindness. As the evidence of a viable God diminished, a more sceptical and reasoned form of inquiry asserted itself.

As an idea, religion has been tarnished. When the word is used it invokes a host of negatives. The growing popularity of the term ‘spiritual but not religious’ tells the story. Religion has been separated from spirituality. This is the dogma vs loving kindness divide. In an important sense a ‘natural’ response to the divine has been domesticated and rendered compliant to authority. Hence those who seem themselves as ‘spiritual’ want nothing to do with the cultures of compliance, seen in religious communities.

This is a justified response. It starkly distinguishes between the psychological needs that crave elaboration of the essential theme of behaving well so that one can be ‘saved’ by faith and belief in dogma and sincere acts of loving kindness that are self-directed. 

There was a time when I regularly travelled by train into Sydney. As the train neared Central Station it passed a building which bore a sign – ‘Believe on Jesus and you will be saved.’ Really? The authors of the sign thought that spiritual salvation was a deal based on accepting a belief and nothing else? You didn’t have to work on yourself, just believe a proposition?

Ham records the litany of cruelties that have flowed from such an assertion. It is easy to imagine that an act of belief can quarantine a person from a litany of abuses. You can be cruel yet saved because you believe. A kind and loving person is consigned to eternal damnation because they have the ‘wrong’ belief.

Why do some people still imagine this is okay? The problem isn’t the religion. They’d find some other justification. The ‘problem’ is their psychological need.

For me religion is a far grander notion than what it has become. It will always reflect the culture in which it expresses. We shouldn’t condemn something because it is manifested poorly. Sex and food are staples of our biological reality and yet we have all experienced awful manifestations of them. Fasting celibates motivated by terrible experiences are scarce.

I am arguing for a rethinking of what religion can be rather than discarding it. It isn’t universally a bad thing, and if we imagine what it can be we can open doors to potential we can’t presently see. Thinking begins with imagination. It isn’t about grinding through rational processes. The history of science tells us this.

To me what we have called religion is a holistic response to life as we experience it – dogma free.

Where do we go from here?

The Soul has obliged me to think more deeply on the nature of psychological needs. If reincarnation is a valid idea, it suggests we enter our biological lives with existing needs and triggers that then get tangled up with whatever nurture experience we have. Karma is profoundly complex, maybe? It’s not the simplistic moral ledger balancing vices and virtues of popular belief.

Quite some decades ago now I had an interview with an non-physical entity who was the teacher of an occult group I was then associated with. The entity expressed through the partner of the group leader. I have had several such interviews since then with other entities.

I was having issues with the group. I was frustrated and impatient. The entity told me things about me which were beyond the insight capacity of the group leader and then observed that magick wasn’t my challenged area. I had major challenges in myself.

That statement has stuck with me since then. I recall it regularly. Indeed, my life has been a struggle with self-awareness and balance. Still is in a lot of ways. I have a sense at times that in a past life I was an extreme believer, maybe a participant in the Spanish Inquisition I have no evidence that I was, its just that that time strikes me as being at least indicative – it gives shape to a deep sense that I was a perpetrator of cruelty in the name of my faith.

We are a fusion of nature [what we bring with us] and nurture [our life experiences in our organic body]. That fusion of itself is deeply complex and in a world full of others similarly steered who knows how easy it is to be diverted into mistaken paths in the name of virtue.

In part religion frames how we imagine reality, and how we behave in it. Its core is essentially animistic. Christianity started to depopulate the ecology of spirit so it could disenfranchise agents that did not conform to its dogma. It also sought to diminish the validity of non-conforming thinkers through torture, death and banishment. These were the first steps toward atheism and materialism.

Why did anyone imagine that a religion that behaved so brutally and against the values of its ‘founder’ would flourish? It did flower briefly and has been diminishing steadily for a very long time. I am inclined to think the decline happened when the word religion was invented – so there was a sense of something was not that. We created the idea of religion so we could escape from what had been created.

Science, liberated from materialistic dogma is delicately restoring the ecology of spirit, albeit in language that is new and ideas that are tentative. But the signs are unmistakeable.

In terms of spirituality, we must think psychologically and look closely at what impels our need to craft beliefs we imagine will satisfy our needs.

Conclusion

For me The Soul has been an extraordinary stimulant that has signposted where my earlier inquiry into the nature of belief should progress.

I commend the book – all 800 pages and over 38 hours as an audiobook – as a remarkable effort at writing history of the soul/mind. I saw a review that complained Ham said gods were a human invention – and therefore the book wasn’t worth the read. But it isn’t a book pushing a dogma. There is no hint of dogma, just an opinion – mildly offered.

Ham isn’t right, but neither is he wrong. It’s a position one can hold and do no injury to the vast scholarship necessary to craft this book. You can’t write a book like this without some hint of imperfection.

It doesn’t have a conclusion – as in a summing up and a declaration of what is in the author’s mind. That conclusion is up to the reader. I hope you engage with it and get as much out of it as I did.

Introduction

I seem to have been deluged by videos on the theme of our ancestors engaging intensely with the night sky and orientating structures to the solstices or stars.

Back in 1997 I had moved to a remote house outside Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania. I was taking up a role as Community Recovery Coordinator in the wake of the shocking mass shooting event the year before. One evening I had gone to bed before 22:00 but was unable to get to sleep. I lay in bed in a dark room with my eyes mostly closed for around 4 hours. I may have drifted off briefly. Around 02:00 I heard a car approaching. I assumed it was my sister who was late leaving Hobart. I suddenly remembered I had forgotten to leave an outside light on as promised. I sat up and glanced out the window as I was about to turn the light on. I was stunned by what I saw.

The sky was awash with light of such intensity I felt overwhelmed. I could see stars well enough but not with a dark backdrop, rather wash of light that ranged from soft to strong. Everything felt so close. There was no moon. I wanted to stay gazing out the window, but I had to get downstairs. I have to confess I also felt a sense of relief as I turned away.

I had looked at night skies for many years before then. I had lain by campfires in the Tasmanian wilderness a gazed up into clear cold skies where the stars were crisp, and the Milky Way was bright. But I had never seen anything like that night at Port Arthur. What made this experience so unique wasn’t the sky. My eyes hadn’t been exposed to light for around 4 hours. Every other time I had looked at a night sky there had been light from campfires or torches.

This experience had a profound impact upon me and transformed how I thought about how our ancestors saw the heavens. Below I want to reflect on this theme.

Proximity

I grew up leaning how far away the moon, sun and stars are from Earth. Our ancestors didn’t have those ideas. They were out of reach of course, even when they climbed a mountain.

In Genesis 11:1-9 we are told of people determined to build a tower that “reaches to the heavens” (NIV). How close were “the heavens” to them? If my experience was any guide, they were very close – but just out of reach. Our ancestors also thought the (night) sky was a place. That suddenly made sense to me. It had a sense of presence. It was somewhere not too far away. It was part of where I was – like the far bank of a wide river is.

The heavens, in this sense, are part of the environment – the world of human experience. There was movement, and any movement in one’s environment was meaningful. Such movement should be observed and interpreted. The heavens were populated, like the Earth.

Paradoxical nature

The heavens were not visible in the daytime. When they were visible, they were not reachable by any living person but shamans. Hence there was a strange duality – visible then invisible, close but out of reach.

Our ancestors were animists. Their reality was full of lives. Heaven and Earth were a unity – a community. They interacted.

We have replaced place and presence with space and absence. Either way the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is replete with potential. Our potential expresses absence and remoteness – which may be why what comes out of our sense of potential expresses as UFOs.

Our ‘heaven’ is unthinkably vast and remote – there is no place amenable to life as we define it anywhere near our ability to go there. In fact, it has been a rational act by our culture’s ‘finest minds’ to wonder whether we are alone in the cosmos – in terms of life in general and intelligent life in particular.

If by ‘heavens’ we mean literal physical places there could be something in that. However here we are seeing the conditioning of materialism imposing a dogma. The ‘heavens’ might also be states of reality expressed in other dimensions – signified by a perception of the night sky.

Other dimensional realities are testified to in accounts of OOBEs, NDEs, dreaming, mystical encounters and so on. Arguably imagination at least participates in such realities too. And let us not forget the technological phenomenon of ‘virtual reality’.

By stripping away any sense of interdimensional reality we not only dispossess ourselves of a legacy as old as human history, we replace relational proximity with spatial loneliness.

That encounter with the heavens I experienced was intense and intimate. Its still there. Its just that we are functionally blind to it. Where and how we live now has dulled our vision.

Three points on the horizon

As I write this, we are coming up to the summer solstice in just under 3 weeks. On 21 December (give or take a little) the sun will rise in the morning on the eastern horizon at its most extreme point north. From there it will travel south until it hits its most southerly point – the winter solstice. The mid-point between these two extremes is recognised as the autumn and spring equinoxes, depending on which direction the sun is travelling along the horizon.

The solstices are clear markers. The sun reverses course. All you need is a fixed point and repeated timely observations sufficient to establish a pattern.

Cultures around the world have used the solstice sunrise to orientate their important structures. In one sense it’s a primary, easy, thing to do. It enables a reliable awareness of the passing of a year – giving a foundational sense to the rhythm of Earthly time. Yet on that foundation more complex examination of how the heavens behave been based. Arguably our present astronomy was born from that original measurement.

We have able to do so much more because we invented the clock. We agree on when is midnight and hence can coordinate so many time sensitive activities – like flight and train timetables (so we don’t have crashes), when businesses open or close, and (in days gone by) you could catch the news on your telly (that still happens, only fewer people are bothered).

These 3 points on the horizon also set the year into seasons. If we take the summer solstice as a starting point, we have the summer season through to the autumn equinox. Autumn continues from there to the winter solstice, and winter extends to the spring equinox. Spring proceeds to the summer solstice and the cycle begins again. Seasons aren’t real in the sense that they are defined by anything other than convention, but the rhythms of weather and the response of animals and plants are real. They may be messed up now, though.

These days the popular convention is that summer starts 3 weeks earlier on 1 December. Have we forgotten the solstice or are we simply seduced by human fiat to measure time by a made calendar rather than natural event?

The ability to see

That early morning encounter with a stunning sky was an accident in the sense I did not consciously intend it to happen. It helped me appreciate that what appears to our eyes isn’t always what is present. How much do we not see?

I got a telling lesson a few years later. In 1999 I had enrolled in a Social Ecology course, and I had an elective called Sense of Place. The idea was to select a location and return to it regularly over several weeks and note how one’s perception of that changes.

I selected a 100-metre-long portion of Broadwater Beach. I thought I’d do a photographic essay. On my 5^th visit I was in a state of despair. All I could see was the same beach I saw on my first visit. Then something profound happened. I suddenly noticed patterns in the sand created by mineral and organic content, wave behaviour, the tides, wind, rain, the angle of the sun, and whether there were clouds.

Light reflecting off wet sand was golden in the morning and silver in the afternoon. I started going before sunup and late in the afternoon before the light had fled. What I feared was the same old beach visit after visit was transformed into a captivating ever changing canvass. The spirit of the place was making sand art and I was coming to see it.

What was supposed to have been a month-long exercise became a 5-month passion. I ended up offering 30,000-word project report with photos and poetry. My supervisor was okay about me doing that, so long as I didn’t bore him.

I haven’t looked at a landscape or a place the same way since then.

Conclusion

It is interesting that the day sky hides so much. It shows us our waking mundane world but hides the full spectrum of its subtle relationships with levels of reality that are fundamental to our full sense of who are.

What I learned at Broadwater Beach was to shift my expectations and allow the daylit world to show me more. Port Arthur was about my eyes being dulled by light. Broadwater Beach was about my mind being dulled by sight.

In both cases it is about not being to see what is there, and not being able to have a deep relationship with what is present.

Introduction

I was encouraged to read James Madden’s Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World by Jeff Kripal whose recent books have been immensely stimulating to me [How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities].

Madden is a philosopher and his take on the UFO theme was immensely helpful in a completely unexpected way. He referred frequently to Kripal’s work, and to D. W. Pasulka [American Cosmic] and Jacques Vallee [Passport to Magonia and others]. I had to revisit Pasulka and Vallee to keep a perspective on what Maddon was arguing about.

The attention that serious academics are paying to the UFO theme is important. I have lost count of the UFO books I have read over the decades. These haven’t necessarily been written by authors with an academic background. That’s not an issue most of the time. But what academics like Madden, Kripal, and Pasulka bring is a level of intellectual rigour often absent. It isn’t that they have a superior perspective, just one that adds a valuable point of view.

I am aware that most folk with an interest in UFOs focus on the nuts-and-bolts aspect and the idea that ET is from elsewhere in our physical universe. But Luis Elizondo’s recent [2024] book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs struck me as reviving the case for interdimensional travel that I first encountered in Vallee’s Passport to Magonia. Intrusions into our reality by interdimensional entities [and travel into interdimensional realms by humans] have been a consistent theme throughout human history.

Madden’s book has obliged me to rethink how I understand my own UFO and non-ordinary experiences. I had been heading down this path for some time in a somewhat disorganised manner, but Madden’s argument about the idea of a hyperobject anchored me and triggered a flood of insights.

I want below to reflect on those insights and my reaction to them. I should observe, however, that I am not trying to persuade the reader to my conclusions. They are based on my experiences and will not apply necessarily to the reader. The point of interest is that the UFO theme is far wider and more complex than the nuts-and-bolts perspective. As Jeff Kripal argues, we need to escape the temptation to think in either or terms and dare think both and– even if doing so immediately triggers us to recoil against the apparent impossibility of that being doable and valid.

Just for the record I am not saying no UFOs are of the nuts-and-bolts variety, just not all.

Are we dealing with a spectrum of experiences?

In a recent email I wrote [as a consequence of reading Madden], “As I reflected on my own experiences the two seemed at times intertwined. [this was my UFO experiences and my ‘regular’ non-ordinary experiences] I ended up with 3 categories – UFO related, UFO adjacent and experiences that had no discernible relationship with UFOs. It seems that it is a spectrum. The UFO content is either dialled right up, or so way down as to be indiscernible.”

Vallee has argued that the themes of UFO encounters are not confined just to UFOs and are sometimes replicated in folklore and religious traditions. So in terms of being disruptive of our normal, UFOs belong to a varied set of disruptions that share similar attributes with non-UFO experiences. How, or why, this might be the case is a question Madden offered a solution to.

But why is it a question worth asking? If your interest in UFOs is mainstream, there is no evident reason to think it is. My initial interest in UFOs was casually mainstream, partly because I had had a compelling sighting when I was 14. As a once intensely devoted sci fi addict I was completely comfortable with the idea of ET visiting us in nuts-and-bolts craft.

I also grew up with what are called paranormal experiences. I call them ‘non-ordinary’. They and UFOs collided in the early 1970s when I accidentally found myself involved in a group committed to communicating with ET. That intersection lasted less than a year. The UFO theme faded back to the mainstream and stayed that way until 1995 when there was another collision which became a fusion. But I stubbornly maintained an intellectual distinction between my non-ordinary experiences and UFOs because I had found no compelling means to fuse them. Madden’s articulation of a hyperobject offered an instrument to enable the fusing to happen.

The reader is better off seeking a discussion on hyperobjects than looking for a definition. I found the following definition via google. It wasn’t very helpful:

Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time. And they exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. I prefer to think of hyperobjects as ‘big ideas’ whose nature isn’t immediately apparent and whose contents are not evidently associated with it.

A point of argument and disagreement

Madden referred frequently to Prometheus in the context of him being the ‘god of technology’. He referred to Prometheus also as a hyperobject. He was referring to the Promethean gift of fire manifesting as technology and maybe epitomised in the UFO as part of a philosophical argument that I got badly distracted from following closely. It wasn’t that I was disagreeing, but I was seeing a far bigger picture.

Madden’s take on Prometheus struck me as being more literary than philosophical in that the business of him being the god of technology is similar to the invention of Lucifer. We first encounter Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12 in a bit of a rant about the plane Venus. He becomes the Christian devil in the same way the serpent of Eden is creatively fictionalised to serve rhetorical purposes. Prometheus was transformed into the god of technology via a fictional fiat.

That’s fine. Fictions are powerful instruments which can deliver useful truths. In this case neither Prometheus nor Lucifer are the original meanings of the stories that bore them. And, strangely they are also related. I’ll come to that.

Linking Prometheus to UFOs makes sense since presently we can see UFOs as the apex of technological development – from our perspective. But we are talking about the fictional Prometheus who has evolved out assuming that the stolen ‘fire’ is literally the fire we see in our physical world.

Why would we do that? Myths convey deep themes in narrative form. Obviously, fire is a necessary foundation of so much of our technology. We could have no metals, no glass, and so much else without the heat originally generated by fire. There is no doubt that fire in the physical world transformed humanity. But ‘fire’ has other meanings and associations – like generating warmth as communal focal point and giving light. Why take a thin slice of meaning and discard the rest? Why not see Prometheus as the god of community and the god of enlightenment?

Exactly why technologists want to appropriate a myth of this nature to champion their passion for technology isn’t explored sufficiently in my view. Perhaps there are useful commentaries of which I am unaware. Madden doesn’t strike me talking about an actual god, but more a symbol of a grand, but unarticulated idea. It seems folks like the idea the Promethean tale because it speaks to them, satisfying a need they may not have conscious knowledge of.

I am interested in this phenomenon because without it, Prometheus would be unknown to other than fans of the Greek tradition. So, when Madden says Prometheus is a hyperobject, does he mean as a symbol or as an actual god?

What is the big idea that UFOs signify?

The evolution of technology has had a singular pathway, and an aspect of fire has been critical. This is especially the case over the past few centuries. Nuclear energy is presently the most terrible analogue of fire we have developed. The association of UFO with nuclear weapons suggests a compelling relationship that has symbolic and moral connections.

We can fold back those connections to Prometheus as reason why we embarked on our perilous pathway. If the end is suicidal, are we blaming a symbol or a god? Is the UFO a moral warning against our reckless folly or a signal of future hope? Maybe both?

So, does the UFO occupy only the technological end of the spectrum of possible meaning? Or does it participate in a wider drama of meaning and morality?

We are disposed to see technology as something apart. We used to believe that humans uniquely were tool users. Now we know that’s an insubstantial conceit.

In between states of mind and confusion

I am working through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. I think its an intellectual masterpiece that is also very long and demanding. One of his early thoughts has stay with me. We have disenchanted the world through our rationalism and materialism. 

I think we are in a transitional phase as we find the basis for a new enchantment. This is what Kripal’s work is about – though he doesn’t use that term – to my recollection. 

Over 12 months ago I became fixed on the idea of the ‘future of human spirituality’. I still haven’t figured out why I had to specify ‘human’ spirituality. Could be to drive home an as yet unconscious rhetorical point.

That transition is vitally necessary as materialism and aspects of Christianity have waged war on a once thriving ecosystem of spirit. So, it is deeply interesting to consider exactly what the state of play is at the time that UFOs have emerged as a powerful theme in our culture.

The nuts-and-bolts devotees have their story – there’s a prospect of access to unlimited clean energy. Those claiming to be abductees have another perspective that has ecological and moral elements. If we allow both to fuse, we have a more holistic vision that blends both.

And then there Pasulka’s angle – that there’s an element of the religious that we need to factor in as well. There are aspects of how we respond to UFOs that are distinctly religious. In the background we have Prometheus as a possible god.

There is no doubt that Prometheus is a better god for us than Jehovah. The mere fact that he has been adopted by unbelievers as their god of technology makes this point.

What we are seeing with our evolving technology is what I see as a ‘techno-animism’ which seems to part of a drive to re-enchant our human-mediated reality. Are we moving toward an intelligent living technology that will create an ecosystem of the made which may one day mesh with ecosystem of the natural? Is there a god for that?

You gotta be kidding! Right?

No, I am not. If you don’t allow yourself to go where the evidence points you are engaging in dogma and apologetics. We are bedevilled by a deep suspicion of religion thanks to the way it has been done badly and has become a tyranny of dogma and coercion. I get that. But we do a lot of things badly that are wonderful when done well. I am thinking sex and food immediately. Who wants to be a starving celibate because of a few lousy experiences?

My point is that Madden almost goes there by declaring Prometheus a hyperobject, but what did he mean Prometheus is in this sense – a symbolic abstract or a god?

What is the ‘big idea’ behind UFOs? If we go beyond the nuts-and-bolts literalism, which surely we must, we end up with some kind of controlling mechanism which aligns the various manifestations of interdimensional contact into a continuum. That control, rule, or logic either arises from an entirely abstract intelligence, rather like mathematics, or a sentient one – maybe another case of both and?

So, UFO contact with Earthlings can’t be solely be a case of random ETs turning up here in their nuts-and-bolts spaceships because they fit a model that is echoed in human history as contact with fairies, demons, and gods. Our religions have been informed by such contacts. But not all contacts have a religious dimension. The consequences might also be philosophical or scientific. The UFO technology is a minor aspect of the contact.

Because our fixation on technology – a common theme of sci fi stories – can dominate our evaluation, we think of UFOs in predominantly technological terms. Historically any interdimensional craft’s technology would be of least importance to experiencers. And now, despite claims of secret reverse engineering, the best we might confidently assert is we really don’t understand the technology. We also don’t know where they come from, or why they are here – at least not in terms of any admitted public knowledge. 

The definitive impact UFOs have on us is to precipitate doubt about our current notions of reality. It wasn’t so long ago that our scientific community’s position was that we were alone in the universe and the very apex of intelligent life. That educated conceit was contradicted by the religious and contactees. We can maybe agree that UFOs have impaled our conceits.

Is there an intelligence governing the UFO phenomena?

What about gods?

I have no empathy with theists in terms of their dogmas, but I do understand the impulse to believe. What we believe in is mediated by personal experience, culture, and history. We all have our version of a big idea – with varying degrees of coherence and complexity.

I quit my family’s faith [Protestant Christianity] when I was 6 when I was punished for emulating Jesus and suggesting my parents do likewise. It was probably the latter that attracted the penalty. But they had sent me to Sunday school against my wishes under threat of physical chastisement. I liked Jesus. He was a nice man. So being punished for following his teachings was a deal breaker for me. Besides I was dealing with a bunch of non-ordinary stuff nobody wanted to know about.

That non-ordinary stuff ensured that while I quit religion, I had no motive to become an atheist or a materialist. I didn’t like the Christian god, and I wasn’t too keen on his followers, but I had a sense there was more to the story. I later practiced western ritual magick and Wicca. The idea that gods and goddesses were real was baked into those systems.

In the late 1970s I had experiences interacting with discarnate entities called ‘inner plan teachers’. Two who were associated with the occult orders I studied under provided me with compelling evidence that they were real. The 3^rd I had lengthy interactions with via my partner at the time over a couple of years. I recorded many hours of our conversations and transcribed a lot.

To answer the question the reader will doubtless be forming about how I determined the experience was real I will simply observe that as a natural scientifically minded sceptic I did perform tests to assess whether it was. My partner, the channel, was filled with doubt. She feared what was happening was a projection from her subconscious and nothing about it was real. A good deal of my conversations with the teacher concerned her problems and the difficulties they were creating in the communication process. The communication sessions were eventually discontinued but I had no doubt they were genuine. I’d also exhaustively researched the theme of mediated communication. And I had no desire at all to delude myself.

That’s a long-winded intro to some remarks about the gods. Because we were engaging in ritual magic at the time I had some doubts about whether the gods we were invoking were real or human inventions. As I noted above, I am a sceptic. I want to pause and observe that a sceptic is not a denier, but a doubter. The word has been debased by materialist dogmatic deniers. Good scientists are sceptics. It is curiosity and doubt that make them good. I was a science nut before my non-ordinary experiences dominated my life and I took that commitment to doubt with me.

I was given several clear messages on the subject of gods:

• They are very real.
• They are of the One, not as the One. This was an emphatic distinction.
• They might, from time to time, command human action – and this was pretty much non-optional.

This made what we were doing in ritual magic pretty petty to me. I often struggled to understand why we were invoking god forces for poorly formed reasons and quit the practice when my doubts overwhelmed motivation. I wasn’t into power for its own sake.

Back on track.

Subsequent non-ordinary experiences left me in no doubt that there was a potent non-ordinary intelligence influencing the world. But was it a god? I had no way of knowing. The thing about a hyperobject is that you never see all of it – just the bits impinging on your awareness.

This is what a lot of faithful don’t understand when they claim they speak to/are spoken to by God. They cannot know that. Their beliefs may lead them to that conclusion, and they make the claim based on those beliefs, but that’s all that can be honestly asserted. This is a reason why many innocent and gullible folks are duped by prophets and pastors who seem to others to be talking utter nonsense.

I have no doubt soever that there are non-physical agents with whom I interact and who can and do influence things on the physical plane. That’s based on substantial experience and is legit. Other folks have physical agents who influence things on their behalf. Let’s not discriminate on whether your influencer is physical or not. You can have a physical influencer, a priest, interceding on your behalf with a non-physical influencer – a saint.

The key question is whether such influences are real. Vallee surveys the spectrum of such claims in Passport to Magonia. And then we have UFO as a source of influence as reported by contactees and abductees.

My point is, as I have seen in my own life, that stuff can happen when non-physical and physical influencers work together. The physical influencer need have no idea what influences them. Whether this is an act of a god is a moot point. It may be an act in conformity with what is understood to be the god’s will or intent.

Can we know whether a god has acted in our favour? Unlikely. Can we know a god exists? Equally unlikely. The best we can hope for, most of the time, is that a reliable authority passes on a trusted insight or knowledge. And that is a vast scope for delusion and deception.

The legions fleeing Christianity found, despite claims, there is no reliable evidence its god exists, let alone that it is reliably effective in delivering the interventions claimed on its behalf. There are those for whom their faith generates effects in conformity with their beliefs. This is also close to what magick is – and this applies to any system of belief and practice.

There is justifiable scepticism about the reality of gods, and I am not discouraging such scepticism. Maintain it. Just step back from utter rejection.

Back to Prometheus

In the late 1970s I was a participant in several seriously strange occurrences that precipitated a frustrating interest in Prometheus. It was frustrating because the inner plane teacher we were in touch with insisted only in giving oblique hints on the grounds that his role was to teach us how to think, not tell us stuff. 

I must have a particularly stupid side because I made virtually no progress on thinking about Prometheus until I read Madden’s book. In the back of my mind I did recall that there were two pieces of information granted me. The first was that this ‘god’ is called Prometheus only in the Greek tradition – with which it seems we have past life links. I couldn’t get any information about who he was in other traditions – apparently not useful information. The second idea was that in thinking about Prometheus a useful symbol was the familiar Greek flaming torch.

The version of Prometheus Madden promoted is that of a ‘god technology’. The logic is obvious. Fire is the foundation of almost everything we think of as technology these days. But was that the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods? That’s unlikely because that kind of fire occurs in nature – via lightening strikes and volcanoes. 

Besides this is a myth laden with symbolism, not an incident report. It is more likely that the stolen ‘fire’ has a meaning drawn from how we evocatively use the word – or what it symbolises.

I had almost forgotten the flaming torch. What does that symbolise? A kind of illumination essentially – awareness. That sounds familiar. Isn’t that what happened in Genesis? The serpent conveys to Eve knowledge of good and evil, previously entirely owned by the God/s – a kind of theft involving deception. Prometheus deceived the gods. The serpent deceived Eve – as the story goes in what could simply be a deft bit of mythic blame shifting.

Comparing myths can be a fraught business at the best of times. I merely observe that here are two themes very close together once we see that the Promethean fire might be torch fuel to ‘enlighten’ human consciousness – just like the ‘knowledge of good and evil’.

We must be careful not to let materialists capture Prometheus and bind to the mountains of technology. I am not here asserting an actual Prometheus but a literary fiction that has evolved out of myth in a similar fashion to Lucifer. Both have their place and value in our culture but neither are connected to their sources in any real way. Neither is how they are interpreted mythic. Both are fictions and may have a symbolic value – just not a mythic one.

So why bother? Well, because I don’t think literary fictions can be hyperobjects. They are too ill-defined and insubstantial. I do think a god can be, though. This means we must separate literary fiction from myth before we can progress our thinking.

Absent compelling direct evidence, I don’t think we can ‘know’ whether gods exist. We can think or believe they do as a theory or a belief. But the idea of a god as a hyperobject appeals to me. The evidence must be the coherence of themes that at least get us to thinking there is the prospect of an organised unity. That doesn’t have to be absolute. It can be contextual. We are talking gods, not God, here.

Vallee makes the compelling point that what we see as sophisticated craft as UFO have been seen as exotic airships. Experiences are filtered through our knowledge, perceptions and imaginations. The UFO may or may not be a 3D object, but it certainly seems to be something that can appear to be – as well as whatever else experiencers imagine.

And here’s the problem. We can’t confirm the nature of the manifestations of any imputed hyperobject. So how can be form definitive notions about its nature?

I like the idea that the hyperobject might be a god some of us call Prometheus, and which may have been represented in the Eden myth as a contrarian snake. I like this idea simply because it shakes the hell out how we think – and there’s a risk there may be some truth in it all.

I call myself an animist deeply conscious that the word is carrying a heavier burden than it should in this context. But there’s not yet an alternative that bridges the dimensions of meaning it has for me.

I am completely comfortable with the idea of gods. While I may have been dumb about Prometheus in particular I have spent the last 40 years getting to grips the idea of gods being very real.

My present position is to assume there is a god we can call Prometheus and then behave in a way that might generate empirical consequences. Seeing this god as a hyperobject which might express as UFOs is going to take some doing. But what’s the point of having a theory if you can’t test it?

I am already cool with the idea that non-physical agents routinely impact material reality in intentional ways. Now I need to upscale. Do I think I am going to get unequivocal confirmation? I don’t know. When I started to type this my intent was to say ‘Frankly, No.’ But I had a firm intuition not to say that.

Back to UFOs

Are UFOs the form our mindsets have forced upon the inner plane dwellers who engage with us? Has our fixation with technology as the highest form of intelligent expression dictated how we accept inter dimensional communion? 

I don’t rule out that UFOs are also genuine craft for what appear to us as organic beings to travel in. they could be necessary vehicles to facilitate inter-dimensional travel as well.

Think of the car. It’s a nuts-and-bolts machine. It is also expressed in a huge variety of forms intended to appeal to our egos, conceits, delusions and dreams. None of those forms are necessary for the car’s essential utility – unless they are specific to functions – race car vs bush-basher for eg.

This nuts-and-bolts machine inhabits our cultural or psychological space way more than our physical space. It signifies more than the mere utility of moving through space. It has informed how our living spaces are designed – and experienced.

If we could imagine the idea car as a hyperobject, how would we describe it? It would maybe be close to being a kind of god. I don’t mean a big god, just a member of a family of gods – a functionary, not a ruler.

I am making the point that a vehicle that is very familiar with us has deep and complex with our psychology, culture, and life world. Maybe the UFO is, at its core, just a conveyance. But who is conveyed and why?

If we stick to the notion that UFOs convey ET or aliens, we need to dive into what those terms mean. A god is an ET. So is someone who comes from Sirius, or from a non-material dimension. Our myth traditions don’t tell us where these ‘others’ come from in any consistent way, but there is a blend of far off on this plane and somewhere else on other planes.

What we can know is that conscious intentional agents have been entering or intersecting with our sense of reality for as long as we have records. Sometimes we have needed to loosen up our grip on this reality via drugs or ritual or other practices. But ‘here’ seems more like a grand central station than a remote backwater that has led some to the ludicrous notion that we might ‘be alone’.

The specific idea of what we call a UFO has arisen in the age of flying machines. It must signify that it is more than what our machines can be. It is both metaphor and actuality. 

An audiobook I recently finished [Magnificent Rebels] made the compelling point that reason and imagination are fundamentally connected. The book concerns the late 19^th century German romantic thinkers who thought that art and science were inseparable. It reminded me how materialism had censored so many alternatives to its dour utilitarianism. Its what Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, described as ‘disenchantment’.

In a way the UFOs is our disenchanted perception of an interaction caused by the fact that we are condition to imagine we are alone in the cosmos. How might these interactions be perceived if we were free from that monstrously silly idea?

I seem to have spent my life struggling to dishabituate my consciousness from dominant mindsets. Sometimes this has been exhilarating but mostly it’s been fraught, difficult and unpleasant. If we persist in shoehorning the ‘impossible’ into entirely mundane thought containers we will not find a good fit. The pragmatic thing to do is prune the ‘impossible’ to fit.

While the idea of a hyperobject has been unexpectedly liberating for me I am struggling to see what kind of discrete hyperobject might generate UFOs. But I like the idea of a god as a hyperobject. However, for that notion to be anywhere close to thought sensible we do need to completely re-imagine what we mean by the idea of a god.

Conclusion

There’s a place for gods in our evolving scheme of things. As we inch toward theories of consciousness underpinning reality, we can ask how that reality is organised and whether the gods our ancestors reported were not part of that organisation.

Theories of the transition from underpinning consciousness to material stuff can evade the idea of entities like gods if we want, but we may have to invent other steps to address their absence. Simply put we may need ideas of gods to help us organise our evolving theories of consciousness as the foundation of being – at a cosmic scale all the way down to our personal experience.

The Greeks developed the story of Prometheus to convey a deep truth. The Jews have their god of Genesis to tell their version of that truth. In the Greek myth what was stolen was fire. In the Jewish myth what was stolen was ‘knowledge of good and evil’. The thieves were punished [acts of self-sacrifice?] but what was stolen was never restored to those who asserted ownership. The transition seems to be irreversible. This is important. 

What becomes known cannot be returned to ignorance. The gods who claimed ownership of fire could not recover it. The gods who claimed ownership of the knowledge of good and evil could not recover it. What is done can’t be undone. What is known can’t be unknown. The rulebreakers can only be punished – kinda pointlessly.

I am not insisting that Prometheus is a real god. But I make several observations: 

1. Our culture needs a meta-narrative that has been traditionally provided by our myth traditions. But it must be attuned to our age. We need a big idea that gives shared meaning and purpose.
2. As the power of the agrarian Jehovah myths have declined and faith in traditional religion has waned, the Promethean story has been revived in the service technology – at a time when we might need a new big idea.
3. Scientific advances are dispelling the dogma of materialism in favour of an emerging narrative about consciousness.
4. UFO is injecting into our normal a stimulus to re-imagine how we think things are.

The relationship between Prometheus and Lucifer is that both are bringers of fire/light to humanity. Both are re-imagined as tragic heroes as fictional characters. Or are we seeing the evolution of a new mythos to convey a new truth coming freshly into consciousness? We always need myths.

Our affection for rationalism and materialism has misled us into thinking that we don’t need myths or enchantment. Our present peril has arisen, I believe, because of that misjudgement. A crisis foreseen – baked into our destiny? A dramatic peril that is finally transformative? Is that how great stories end? And the next instalment is…..?

Are UFOs part of that evolving new mythos? Their possible interdimensional nature neatly matches our technological trends which take us to the very edge of materiality, but not yet beyond it. And that’s the point – not yet. We are on the doorstep of interdimensional awareness, unaware we are knocking. So when that door is opened we will not be ready. 

UFOs and their earlier analogues are associated with transformation. Once encountered we cannot unknow. In this sense there’s a Promethean or serpent element about them. They have, in the past, betokened an enchanted reality, and now they seem to be heralds of a re-enchantment of our arid materialistic sense of the real.

What do we dare think? That’s always the question.

Its not my goal to persuade the reader toward a conclusion or belief. My goal is to trigger questions among those who dare go beyond their safety zones of beliefs and opinions.

And no, I don’t have a settled opinion. I am still tyring to figure it out. Its damned exciting.

Introduction

In my ongoing quest to de-Christianise my mind I regularly watch Dan McClellan on YouTube. I am especially interested in claims he responds to, and which reflect how incoherent ideas about the Christian God are. This isn’t a criticism of the believers, just my response to my efforts to make sense of what is claimed. I have also been recently reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Dan’s YHWH’s Divine Images A Cognitive Approach.

I think we share confused and confusing notions of ‘god’ that necessitate the articulation of a definition before any useful conversation might be had.

Below I want to reflect on my own efforts to make sense.

How many versions of God can there be?

Here are, for me, a few discrete notions about what ‘god’ is:

1. The ‘God of nature’
2. The deists’ notion of God.
3. The polytheists’ idea of gods.
4. The esoteric idea of The One/All.
5. The Christian conception of their God.

I am not trying to offer a definitive definition, or any definition for that matter. I want only to observe that these ideas exist and may be variously thought to be mutually exclusive or connected and related – depending on your theological orientation.

From the above 1, 2, and 4 have clear connections – and with an aspect of the Christian God [5]. Polytheists [3] share the idea of an overarching divinity. So, all 5 notions have something in common – there is a singular absolute being.

But humans, being humans, interpret that foundational ‘truth’ in myriad ways that reflect a specific history, circumstance, or culture. This is fine. This is what aught to happen. Problems arise, however, when some seek to impose their version upon others as an objective and singular truth.

While there is general assent [with the exception of materialists] that there is a singular divine reality, some assert their interpretation is the only valid one. This kind of conceit is fine if it is kept in-house. I think it’s a fair thing to say that while we are free to conceive our own notion of the divine, asserting it is an objective truth that may be imposed on other is both psychologically immature and aggressive.

This speaks to a state of immaturity which demands that what is true for an individual – person or community of believers – must be true for all others. This is rather like the materialist mindset which insists that something is true and real only if it can be confirmed by others. What we are doing is defining our relationship with the divine, not defining deity itself. Relationships are inherently subjective.

Obviously, we must specify what it is that we are in relationship with, but this is different from seeing it as an ‘objective’ thing apart which we can define. Any agency with which we have an intimate or personal relationship evokes very different terms of description. Efforts at objective definition will be made by those so disposed, but they don’t get to have the definitive word, no matter how much they fancy they ought. 

We don’t need to conform to a theologically crafted notion of deity, unless doing so is a condition of membership of a faith community. Such communities have inherent and natural imperatives, and demands for conformity are fine.

In one respect requiring conformity is reasonable mindset at a tribal level where conformity is crucial to ensure survival, if not thriving. In our contemporary societies we still have mandatory conformity demands but at a level that seeks to assure that a large, complex and diverse community can peacefully function. We need conformity in such as traffic laws for what I hope are evident reasons.

We used to have demands for conformity in clothing styles and hair length, among other things. Now we mostly don’t. As a culture we are shedding what seem to be unnecessary demands for conformity. True, this is a contested area in some areas as what constitutes proper expression of our individuality is still being negotiated.

We are, I think, well past the time when demanding conformity with religious beliefs is useful, necessary, or tolerable at a societal r cultural level. However, because our collective level of psychological maturity is not uniform there will be those who may earnestly, and even strenuously disagree.

We have a variety of ways to imagine the divine, but it’s a good thing to remember that while there seems to be an agreement about one ultimate divine reality how we conceive of it, according to our needs and capabilities, is a matter of our own choice.

In effect, we cannot ‘know’ God in a manner that renders that knowledge shared and agreed upon without the assent of others. To some such assent might be thought foolish or conceited by their lights. So be it. We will conceive and believe as we need, and it is not for those who are not us to presume to know better. 

Our relationship with any entity reflects or expresses our psychological needs. I don’t distinguish between psychological needs and spiritual needs. Spiritual is yet another word that is confused and confusing. At our core, as humans, we are driven by the need for human-to-human relationships, and then human-to-environment [physical and psychical] needs, and finally human-to-divine relationships. For me it’s all on a spectrum. 

We necessarily use categories to help us think and communicate, but the categories and the words we use to talk about them are our creations. They are not attributes of the ideas we engage with. As we evolve our understanding, we must adapt our ideas and language.

I understand what is meant when folks say they are ‘spiritual but not ‘religious’, but ‘religious’ does not have only one meaning. The statement is nonsensical outside the context in which it may be uttered. What does it mean to be ‘spiritual’ and what does it mean to be ‘religious’? Meanings can capture our minds and imaginations when we think they are inherently bonded to the word.

We are, I believe, naturally seeking freedom to form the best relationships we can.

Many gods?

Assuming there is agreement on there being one absolute divinity it is fair to wonder whether there may be lesser deities. Monotheism as a system among the varieties of religious forms isn’t widespread, and it’s really only its tyranny that has led it such a high degree of support across the world.

Our culture has approached the subject of polytheism from a perspective dominated by monotheism. Consequently, we have been conditioned to think of polytheism as a naive or primitive way of thinking. This is like our take on animism. 

I want to suggest a contrary way of thinking. Polytheism is subtle and sophisticated for several reasons. First all polytheists acknowledge a single overarching divinity. Second, they manage how to conceive of divine presence in their reality by breaking it all down into conceptual sub-units. This is a bit like how a government is organised into departments and other agencies. It is simply necessary to step down from ‘the all’ into the many.

The monotheistic faiths do this too – but in cunning ways. First, they switch between the One and their tribal god conception – a kind of polytheism of just one in effect. Second, they invest divine powers in sub-agents. The Christians are good at this. They have a trinity, which is really only one. The Catholics have Jesus, Mary and saints – all of which are invested with numinous power from God. They also invented Satan/Lucifer. What Christianity has is an assembly of agents justified by painfully tortured theology. And then, of course, there are angels and archangels. We can have a whole hierarchical community – an ecosystem of divine actors and agents.

Polytheism is a terminology that isn’t helpful because we use the same word to denote the overarching divinity and the subordinate deities. The distinction rests on whether the word commences with an upper or lower case g. That’s a bit like calling all government departments and agencies governments. Its just confusing, especially if the majority of us don’t think they exist in the first place.

We don’t have accessible useful descriptions of what a god is. My Oxford Dictionary app says a god is “a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes”. That’s useless as well as misleading. How we might define what a god depends entirely on what metaphysical guesses we have made about reality.

For example, I subscribe to the Hermetic ‘As above, so below’ notion of a holographic cosmic structure. I can’t say it is true, only that it is a presently useful way of thinking for me. If I use the notion that consciousness is the foundation of reality, I can imagine that a god is a large organisation of consciousness expressed as an intent or will to act – a being of distinct attributes who may interact with other similar beings who, as a group, have a shared intent. 

In the context of a holographic model, how might humans imagine gods? Pretty much as we have – as families or communities. It is said that the Hindu tradition has up to 330 million gods/goddesses. That’s 330 million expressions of the overarching divinity and it can seem like a lot if you approach the idea with fixed mind set. Its not like 330 million Thors. It could be 330 million spirits in the natural and human world. We don’t have a rule that says beyond this scale you are a god, and below it you are a spirit. Imprecision rules – and that doesn’t matter unless you are the ideas of gods seriously.

I developed my affection for animism because it made sense of my direct experiences. Once again animism is an unsatisfactory term coloured by Christianity and materialism. I quit practicing ritual magick not because I didn’t think there weren’t gods to be invoked but because I struggled to come up with a good reason for invoking them. I think there’s a lot of nonsense uttered about us having the power to summon gods. When we do excite a reaction it probably another agency helpfully playing along. How would we know?

The people we call animists are also often polytheists. They scaled up the multiplicity of spirits all the way. They know something from their direct experiences, and it is only when we break the habit of thinking them ‘primitive’, at the very dawn of ‘reason’, that the complexity and subtlety of their way of knowing can be explored.

It is certainly true that monotheism and materialism have delivered the extraordinary things in the world we have – to our peril, many might fear. Animistic polytheism had its own problems of corruption and distortion in the cultures where it flourished, but we do need to recall that it laid the foundations of our civilisation. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were hardly slack in reason, rationality or science.

Thinking it all through

For a long time, I had an aversion to saying ‘God’ because it triggered in me deeply adverse reactions lingering from my rejection of Christianity. I have come to accept the word as describing a sense of overarching divinity and nothing more. When I think of Christianity now it is in terms of their god, which doesn’t, to me, merit the big G. It’s not a sentiment I would impose upon a Christian because I am not into disrespecting their faith. I keep my critique to discussions where they are unlikely to be present in any case.

I have been working through how I think about animism and polytheism, steadily altering the ideas that have dominated both themes. Its not just about changing ideas, but sentiments. We must be open minded and open hearted. Intellect without imagination is hobbled and sterile. The materialist myth that science has progressed by reason alone has been starkly and repeatedly refuted and debunked. But the myth persists.

I like the idea of gods. I don’t like the language because it ties us to categorisations that are framed in Christian and materialistic terms. I just don’t feel able to come up with new language yet. We are steeped in a mindset that has dominated our culture for centuries. It has controlled and hobbled how we think. I still find myself snared in its web of inferences. I feel forced to use the language of the oppressor because there is no alternative that can be shared.

I don’t like the idea of talking ‘God’ because its too high level. These days we must see God as the author of billions of galaxies – and who knows how many more. I don’t feel comfortable with the idea that ‘he’ chats with any human directly. I am cool with the idea that ‘he’ has legitimate agents – delegates if you will – who convey genuine divine wisdom. It is unlikely that any are gods, and that’s a good thing. I encountered a ‘god force’ a long time ago and it was harrowing. I can’t explain what a ‘god force’ is. That is how it was described to me.

More likely, when people say ‘God’ spoke to them they are referring to either a helping spirit agency or they have misattributed their own earnest internal dialogue. The latter is more likely. I don’t think ‘God’ talks to humans, and if gods do, I have no reason to imagine it is frequent, or about mundane things. At my mother’s funeral after ‘party’ the place was overrun by Pentecostals. I had to flee and, as I left, I passed a faithful telling another how ‘God’ had come to him as he was brushing his teeth and said blah blah blah. No. That’s not real to me.

I think the divine is real for myriad reasons based on direct experience, not one of which had any association with any faith or tradition. I have had experiences which have affirmed the metaphysical dimension of reality in association with a few groups, but they haven’t been the major experiences. They have been unrelated to creed or community.

I have had the advantage of my experiences which have affirmed to me that there’s more going on than is evident to most of us. But that’s something that happens to us all when we have unique insider experiences. Mine just happen to include paranormal stuff. It has often been a plague, so please don’t imagine I feel any sense of privilege. I feel forced into these ruminations.

Because what we believe serves our psychological needs it is unimportant to others unless there is a harmony of needs. What we say we believe is either a fixed or mutable expression of how we are meeting our needs. We can be exploratory or affirming. 

I assume there is an overarching divine unity which is beyond knowledge or description. It is, for me, the primal template from which the holistic universe expresses. It is grounded in what we call ‘consciousness’. That’s my metaphysical guess. 

Beyond that I have had experiences which affirm the ideas of animism and the possibility of gods. That’s a fluid state of mind with no fixed ideas – other than the reasons for thinking as I do are valid. By that I mean I am satisfied that I have assessed my experiences with sufficient rigor so as to be comfortable they are real and valid. I don’t buy the argument that if an experience isn’t shared and can’t be verified its not real. That’s a set of criteria that apply to things relevant to shared ‘objective’ knowledge. It’s a fair rule for science, for instance.

I agree with those who say my position is vulnerable to error for a range of reasons. Uncertainty is inherent in how we seek to understand things. We are constantly revising scientific knowledge, frequently against the strenuous objections of proponents of ideas once held to be certain. It is well said that knowledge advances one funeral at a time.

We create our own narratives which we share in a community of like-minded members or employ them as instruments of individual self-directed inquiry (although it is likely we have hidden help). More of us are doing this these days.

Ultimately, however, how we behave matters more than what we believe. If we are psychologically healthy and mature, what others believe is unimportant to us – beyond being something of interest. 

The aggressive and oppressive aren’t that way because of their religion. Their religion is that way because of them. The same is true of any shared beliefs, knowledge or values.

Conclusion

We have a choice. We can guess the divine is real or it is not. We could also be uncertain, pending evidence. I am not a believer. In fact, I am a genuine sceptic. I have been obliged by many experiences to acknowledge that there is what I call a metaphysical dimension to our reality. Neither science nor religion are presently able to provide a useful discourse to help me process what were often traumatic experiences. I found more useful stuff in occult and esoteric thought. However, that has tended not to be self-reflective enough.

I think there are gods who are, in the words of a non-physical teacher to me, ‘of the One, but not as the One’. He was entirely cool that gods were real, but his understanding was way beyond mine and he refused to offer more than tantalising breadcrumbs. He observed that his role was to teach me how to think, not tell me stuff. Thanks for that.

That was decades ago. On the subject of gods, he made it plain that they were not to be taken lightly. It wasn’t that they were inherently dangerous in terms of intent, just that their energy wasn’t something to be recklessly exposed to. I recall a similar injunction in the OT.

We mediate power, step it down, through agents. In past times this made sense. Depending on who you were, being brought into the presence of a king was special or dire. Far safer to be distant and deal only with an emissary who may have had royal power but was more approachable.

As we progress into the 21^st century, ideas about who we are and where we are in the pecking order in the cosmos are being forcibly altered. I think the UFO/UAP phenomenon is edging toward a reckoning. Quantum science is unravelling our notions about reality. The human sciences are reframing our sense of identity. Technological developments have utterly disrupted just about everything to do with our physical lives. Oh, and we are stressing our physical organic reality to near breaking point.

The beliefs, practices, and traditions of the past can be a rich source of insight if we don’t look at them through the brash filters of our culture’s dominant discourses. We have definitely ‘progressed’ in many areas, but not in all. We are facing multiple crises which are a legacy of that dominant mindset. Softer eyes can see intimate connections and subtle wisdoms.

I have an aversion to looking backwards in the hope of finding something to rescue us. The idea that we should look back several millennia to ideas about divinity and stories about how to behave offends my sense who we are, and what we are capable of. 

But from inside the prison of materialism and a faith that has decimated our awareness of the subtle and complex ways of knowing of our ancestors, we can be reminded about how to think elegantly – with heart and imagination. Theology and materialistic ‘science’ have napalmed the delicate ecosystem of spirit. New shoots of recovery are poking through the ruins. We can/must celebrate them and nurture them.

The need to re-imagine the divine is being pressed upon us. I don’t think discarding it is an option. It has accompanied us on our evolutionary path for many millennia. I don’t think it’s going away.

Introduction

William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature was published in 1902. Some of the language and ideas grate upon contemporary sensibilities – but there’s not a lot of that. The style is also dated, but I am okay with that because I admire the beauty of pre-word processor prose – when you had pen and ink and had to get it right pretty much from the start.

The book is a classic and I have been aware of it for decades. It has been on my ‘eventually must read’ list for as long. So had Thus Spake Zarathustra. Not reading Nietzsche has been bugging me for ages. But when I finally settled down with an audiobook of Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was disappointed. Maybe I had heard so much commentary that reading it was redundant. I quit about 20% through. That’s a rare thing for me to do, but I had better things to do with my time. Would James be the same experience?

I mention all this because I find I come across books at ideal times. Had I read James any earlier I may not have gotten the value from the book that I did. Now and then I reread books I encountered years before – and its always like reading them for the first time. You engage with a book with whatever frame of mind and understanding you have to give you a unique experience with the book. If you encounter the same book a decade later, assuming you have grown in the interval, you will not have the same experience.

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance around 2006. It had a huge impact on me, so much so that I was eager to encounter it again as an audiobook – in 2021. It was just as remarkable – but it was an entirely different book.

But encountering a book before insights have been matured can also set you off on a fruitless quest – or maybe just a quest for that time?. Would reading James a decade ago been disadvantageous? I don’t know. Maybe an immature apprehension of an idea may have led to a pointless digression.

Now and then

The book is a compilation of 20 lectures James gave in Scotland in 1901/2. I won’t rehash the content of the Wikipedia link above. I want simply to observe that we are a long way and from a time when religious experience was respected as a valid human experience worthy of open academic interest. There’s a hint in the subtitle – A Study in Human Nature. We are moving back in that direction courtesy of neuroscience and psychology. But its still a vexed subject as to whether it is a valid theme of inquiry. Materialism still exerts its dampening influence – though it seems to be weakening year on year in recent times – mercifully.

Engaging with God

Like any book this one is interpreted according to one’s biases and interests. I have spent the past 5 years engaged in my own struggle with what belief is. I concluded, recently, that it all depends on what your psychological needs are.

We are accustomed to imagining that God is claimed to be an objective reality. But the evidence confirms no more than a ‘subjective reality’ which can lead, sometimes, to objective consequences. If you have a need to assert your God is objectively real you will do so. But that’s your need which may not be agreed upon by others.

James affirms the validity of the subjective experience of ‘God’ with its objective consequences. Objectors to the notion that God is objectively real dismiss, also, the subjective experience as invalid. God, ergo, cannot exist, cannot be real.

I will stick to the Christian ideas, with which I am deeply familiar. The Christian God is described as both a member of a pantheon and the supreme cosmic being. But these are two incompatible ideas that can’t be reconciled. Sound contemporary scholarship affirms the pantheistic roots of the Christian idea of God, which persists so long as the Old Testament is an authority. The transition to the ‘mystical’ One/All notion of the divine is asserted as Christianity evolved – but rarely convincingly. Indeed, the mystical version is asserted while the tribal polytheistic god exerts practical influence (via the extrusion from the subjective).

The distinction between the One God and the sole god of tribal pantheistic roots has been blurred in Christianity to unfortunate effect. It has generated utter confusion and theological chaos. One result has been the creation of a fictional deity that is both universal and partisan.

We cannot now look back and make any data-based claims about the reality and impact of the God of the Old Testament. But we can empirically assess the claims made by contemporary Christian about their God. There is a reason why there is a steady stream of disappointed believers departing the faith. 

But it is important to appreciate that mystical effects precipitated by the universal divine may still be expressed through the beliefs, practices and offices of Christianity – just not in any uniform or predictable manner. That is to say that if we accept that the subjective is the ground of our reality of beliefs about the divine it will impinge upon our shared sense of objective reality.

A belief that God is objectively real doesn’t mean that God is, or should be thought so, by others. Such a sentiment is psychologically primitive and more suited to a tribal sense of competing divine powers. Christianity is, I think, a confused paradox which activates tribal passions to assert a universal and unique deity.

Why does this matter to an aspiring animist?

How we see the world absolutely depends upon our ideas and these are informed by personal experience and cultural influence. By the time I turned 16 my world view was shaped by Christianity and materialistic science. Both influences were deeply etched upon my psyche.

This was true for my age peers who took two paths. The majority disengaged from religion but never wholly bought the materialist line. They entered a kind of spiritual limbo. If pressed many would now describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ now – and they would also not actively engaged in spiritual experiences. This is perfectly fine. They are engaged in the experience of being the best human they can be – which is kinda what being ‘spiritual’ is about – or should be.

The second path is that of actively seeking a ‘spiritual life’. This involved selecting from a generous menu of eastern, otherwise indigenous, and archaic traditions which were mostly fused with the needs of urban modernity to create satisfying hybrid systems. This is a completely valid response to a need. It may make no sense to purists, but our needs are not obedient to other people’s notions of what is good, and right, and true. They are obedient to what drives us – from our subjective core.

As noted elsewhere my affection for animism was triggered by accident during an academic inquiry. It suddenly made sense to me. I grew up with multiple ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that I could not understand or place within our culture’s two dominant discourses – Christianity and materialistic science. The alternatives didn’t fit any theoretical model that had any meaning to me until I came across the idea of animism. That was my solution to a deeply vexing problem.

Up to that point I had been involved in Western ritual magic and Wicca and I had read extensively in Buddhism and Zen, as well a wide array of other sources. These were a counter to my exposure to Christianity, which I had consciously rejected at age 7. But I had also grown up with a passion for science – and had lots of ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that didn’t fit any models I was comfortable about accepting. I needed a unifying theory. Animism was a rational toe-hold – the beginnings of a theory.

In Varieties of Religious Experience James affirmed something critical to me. Such experience was, first and foremost, subjective. This is the foundation of the real.

We misunderstand subjective and objective

As I grew up, I was taught that something isn’t real unless it is shareable. If you were the only experiencer, it was subjective and of lesser value – and certainly not entitled to a ‘reality’ claim. This is a bullshit idea of such utter toxicity its impact upon our collective and individual lives has been catastrophic.

We are first and foremost grounded in our subjective experiences. These impact our physical and psychological wellbeing more than anything else. James reminded me that extreme manifestations of ecstatic spiritual bliss are entirely subjective but are accepted (when they are) as valid because their theme accords with cultural and spiritual aspirations of the community. And their affects manifest in a community’s sense of objective reality

Validation/invalidation of subjective experiences is a question of social control. We all live in a social/cultural ecology which privileges natural power structures. Some years a back I read the works of the historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen who asked a question related to an Australian Aboriginal woman who encountered French sailors on a beach in south east Western Australia sometime in the 18^th century. We have the French account of what happened. Inga invited the reader to imagine things from the Aboriginal woman’s perspective. She was ‘contaminated’ by strangeness. Was she killed or exiled by her tribe? 

The idea that strange beings beyond any accepted notion of what is normal might engage with a person who is not privileged by their culture to encounter such strangeness isn’t okay. It’s a violation of critical safety rules necessary for the psychological, physical, and spiritual wellbeing of the whole community. But we are no longer bound by such rules, even though there persist folks whose themselves as appointed guardians. That’s okay in their own tribe or cult. Its not okay to impose that assumed authority on others. But that exactly what believers and materialists have done. They have been unable or unwilling to adjust to the diversity and pluralism of our culture.

Clendinnen’s account mattered to me because my ‘non-ordinary’ experiences violated my culture’s asserted norm. I was ‘bad’ to the dominant religion and ‘mad’ to the dominant science. I had ‘transgressed’ my culture’s rules by having the experiences – as if I had any say in the matter. James acknowledges that such ‘transgressive’ experiences are part of the valid spectrum of encounters he collects under the umbrella of ‘religious’ experience.

Invalidation, because of ‘offences’ against the normal, is common. In the history of science radical ideas can lead to persecution and the ruination of careers. In organisations ‘whistle-blowers’ can so disrupt the normal that special legislation has been created – and that’s still inadequate. In religion non-conformity has led to torture and murder.

We protect the boundary between the shared and the unique with a sometimes brutal determination. In the early 1970s I worked in several psychiatric hospitals. I was occasionally alarmed by how an otherwise functional person could be ensnared in a culture of oppressive ‘care’ because of a single deviation from our norms. Now I contrast those encounters with communities of individuals enthralled in religious delusions which conform with our social norms. Individual ‘madness’ is transgressive. Collective ‘madness’ is normative.

In Christianity extreme non-conformists who don’t overtly threaten the settled orthodoxy, and the status quo can be protected, indulged, and celebrated as radical exemplars. They may be nothing of the sort. But so long as the context of their extreme behaviour is favourable to the faith looking after them is a good thing. Of course they can also be safely killed and later celebrated as a martyr.

We can usefully see personal experience as subjective and the environment it is lived out in as objective (which is really only many subjectivities mashed together). We assert a necessary connection between the subjective and the objective which requires mutual conformity. This places the power of validating the subjective experiences with objective authority. This isn’t necessarily a fair representation of truth. Who holds objective power gets to rule on what is or is not valid – and real.

What appears as an extreme religious behaviour may also be understood as disordered behaviour expressed in a religious context. If religion is seen as a ‘safe harbour’ it makes sense to express extreme behaviours as religious – so long as they conform to the asserted religious norms. 

This is certainly true of psychopathic behaviour. It is possible to be utterly psychopathic so long as one is overtly, and devotedly religious. The persecution, torture and murder of non-conforming or non-compliant individuals is uniquely sanctioned under religious authority – and authoritarian governments of course.

The sanctions for non-conformity against a cultural norm are always strong but are magnified when such a violation offends against religious norms. In part this is because it is assumed that the religious norm equals the existential norm for all individuals. The ‘Church’ speaks on all our behalf’s.

Is God objectively real?

There are two conflicting ideas of the Christian God. One is that of a tribal god who emerged from a polytheistic tradition and had his status inflated to author of the cosmos and the other is the deep mystical sense of the One/the All – the primary foundation of all being.

Christians habitually think in terms of the latter but speak in terms of the former. To say this is confused is generous. In a mystical sense nobody can be ‘against God’ or disobedient. But one can oppose and be disobedient toward a tribal god. 

In essence most Christians talk tribal god but imagine mystical God. This confusion permeates the faith with disastrous results. The present conception of God is a theological fiction at best, and a theological delusion at worst.

There is no rational foundation to deny the mystical All/One short of a determined commitment to materialism. There is a range of arguments arising from the proposition that reality is grounded in consciousness that favour the subjective foundation to reality – a universal commonality matched with infinite specificity.

For reasons based on personal experience I do favour the idea that gods are objectively real. I look at my own body and see that there is a hierarchy of entities – my body-as-a-whole, my limbs and organs, sub-units within those organs going all the way down to cells. 

We do not know whether the ancient idea of the planets being gods is valid because our materialism muddies our thinking to such a huge degree. We simply cannot think at that scale at the moment. That we have bodies makes sense only if that ‘we’ is beyond the body. A materialist might insist, rather, we are our bodies.

Early on the mystical notion of God was that he was beyond imagination, beyond comprehension, beyond description. This really asserts that the root of reality is spirit or consciousness. Whether this is true or not is beyond demonstration. It is a position we may adopt to satisfy our own needs. Likewise, the materialist may take an equally unprovable position – of which they say they are persuaded by reason. This isn’t so. They are persuaded by their subjective needs – like anybody else.

The Christian God is demonstrably a fiction. Scholars have charted its evolution from its tribal pantheistic origins and there is, so far as I have been able to discover, no reasoned evidence to assert its reality.

Are there other agents we might call gods? I think there are, not because I have incontrovertible evidence (I have had experiences that encourage me in that direction) but because it makes sense that there might be. This doesn’t mean that there are agents with whom humans might have a relationship – just forms of consciousness/spirit which are organised and intentional in their own right. It’s a matter of scale essentially. 

Besides, our human heritage affirms we have always thought that there were god or spirits behind the ‘reality’ we perceive in our physical/organic being.

Acts 17:24 says “For in him we live and move and have our being.” I was familiar with this saying from my esoteric education and didn’t know it was in the Bible until I went googling the source. No wonder it is scarcely mentioned. It is a philosophical position at odds with the notion that God and what he creates are distinct.

A divine being who makes ‘reality’ out of their own substance makes eminent sense to me. They can also make lesser gods. An esoteric teacher once explained this to me, saying that the gods were of the One, not as the One.

The moment you insist that God and what is created are separate things you create monstrous problems. This might be sensible for a tribal deity who is a member of a pantheon – in terms of a cultural narrative – when such makes sense to a community. On a larger scale it contradicts not only the deep wisdom of human heritage but also contemporary thoughts about ‘consciousness’ being the foundation of all things.

Conclusion

As James explores the varieties of religious experience, he invites critical reflection predicated on the proposition that religious experience is a valid human experience. The book’s sub-title makes it clear that such validity is assumed.

This is now something we allow is reasonably contested. It isn’t. Materialists will contest the proposition on entirely dogmatic grounds. Religious dogmatists will want to narrow the range of valid ideas to deny those that will not unsettle their dogmatic assertions.

In fact, there is no reasonable contestation. Materialists muddy the water by injecting flat rational denial (not doubt) into a normal and natural sense of uncertainty. 

We do not need to absolutely prove a god/no god argument. We do need to understand the utility of ideas of the divine relative to our personal and collective psychological needs. Some may insist our collective spiritual needs – but I see no distinction.

This is best demonstrated by the way we depict our own dramas. We can set a movie in 4,000 BCE or 4,000 CE. Although we can detail the unique ‘objective’ issues of setting and technologies to fit the age we select we cannot usefully stray from the limits of ‘subjective’ reality. We must remain within the limits of the spectrum of relatable experiences available to us.

We are subjective beings first and objective/organic beings second. The efforts of materialism to flip the order have had a catastrophic impact on our past models. And maybe that’s been a good and necessary, if painful, step in our evolution. I will allow that moving from one mode of thought to another requires rejection of the old. Materialism might be a necessary transition between a before and after psycho-spiritual state.

I have argued elsewhere that our sense of spiritual being must be liberated from the fixed and dogmatic models that dominated our past. Christianity was a hugely disruptive way of belief that led to the downfall of what we now call ‘pagan’ belief systems. It does look like it was time they receded. The same seems now true of Christianity. The counter isn’t the crude rationalism of materialism. It’s what is emerging through freer and more empathic scholarship, more open exploration of NDEs and OOBEs, inquiry into psychotropics as medicine, and developments in neuroscience and psychology. 

We are so far beyond the iron age agrarian narratives that framed Christianity and the other faiths ‘of the book’. It isn’t that we have utterly discredited the ideas from so long ago so much as affirmed the deeper wisdoms while dispelling explanatory narratives that have not sustained their merit against our current ways of knowing. Such ways are, to be fair, still contaminated and distorted by materialism, but we cannot deny the progress made.

We are on the edge of a watershed between two ages. Yes, I know this is hardly a novel idea, but that edge can be a few centuries wide. The markers of the decline of Christianity are debatable, but the decline is not. Arguments about when we move from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius continue without resolution. It must happen sometime – eventually.

I invite the reader to imagine they are in that transition phase which may or may not end during their time here. We are not thinking in terms of certainties and dogmas but in terms of trends and potentialities. We can prepare for what is coming by letting go of what has been. This isn’t everyone’s idea of a good thing, but there is no mercy when changes come. We go with the flow or we are exhausted in our efforts to resist.

The logic of religious faith has been that it endures. But faith in what is true and real isn’t the same as faith in the dogmas and discourses. James affirms the validity of experiences arising from what is true and real as fundamental to our human nature. We are innately religious on that level. 

Our capacity to be captured by dogma and discourses on culture and tradition is another matter. It serves the interests of the captors to merge the two. Indeed, there was a time when this was a necessary and critical merger. But those times are gone.

James wrote his book when those times were unravelling, and it was time to imagine that religious experiences could be described as a ‘variety’. Back then dominance of one faith tradition made the idea of a variety perilous. Then materialism made any experience invalid. True, materialism didn’t eradicate faith, but it did cripple inquiry. We are now struggling under that dogmatic penalty in so many ways.

But what is also true is that the latter part of the 19^th century was a cauldron of new ideas – which continued bubbling into the 20^th century. Christianity allied with materialism to suppress this exciting period. It has seemed strange to me that two erstwhile foes united to invalidate the enthusiasm for novel and unregulated spiritual experience. Was it that threatening?

Studies show that adherence to formal religion is declining. Materialism seems to have obtained a stubborn toehold that isn’t growing into a foothold. There is growth among those who say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’. That is a healthy sign. We are eschewing dogma in favour authentic personal values. I see more of the ‘Christian spirit’ in secular action than in a lot over overtly religious behaviour.

And as generational change is weakening the grip of materialistic dogma on inquiry, we are seeing more free examination of themes that challenge our assumptions about the nature of our shared reality. Daniel Drasin’s A New Science of the Afterlife is an excellent succinct survey.

I commend Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature to you.

Note: Recently a reader commented that they disagreed with what I had written and expressed concern I might be offended. I replied I had no desire to stimulate agreement. In fact, I would be horrified. My intent only is to stimulate thought and self-reflection. You alone are responsible for what you think and believe. All I offer is stimulation.

Introduction

In the US, Australia and the UK (and no doubt elsewhere) people are drawing battle lines over beliefs. Some who identify as Christian are wanting to wage an ideological battle against non-believers. Atheists are battling fundamentalist religious beliefs.

It’s all something of a mess made worse by our struggle to adapt readily to the emerging complex, diverse and pluralistic communities. It’s also a doesn’t help that we think we can engage in rational debates about theological beliefs or that they are even amenable to reason at all.

In an ideal world our communities would comprise people of similar levels of spiritual, intellectual and psychological development. But they don’t.  Hence it becomes not only pointless but dangerous to imagine that our approaches to how beliefs are validated are universally applicable.

The Christian apologist who firmly believes that Christ is the ruler of the world is no better or worse than the devoted materialist/atheist who insists not conception of the divine is reasonable. Neither makes any effort to understand the other and allow them to be who they are.

There are issues of coercion and liberty that are genuinely difficult because they require that, in order to allow freedom, any universalist belief cannot be permitted in a pluralistic culture.  In the US in particular Christian nationalists are creating very real problems with their demands for the universal validity of their claims.

After spending the past 6 years trying to understand what belief is, I have concluded that it’s a construction that satisfies our psychological needs. Our science is moving toward alignment with mystical ideas that reality is crafted by our minds – which are inextricably linked to our psychological states. This is not yet a widely held or popular position, but it is being explored – and that’s a good thing. Materialism isn’t a dominant as it once was, even though it will be decades, if not centuries, before it is finally sent packing as an intellectually justified position to hold.

In essence there is no discernible ultimate objective reality. It is all relational. We can reasonably argue that the Christian god isn’t objectively real, but the same applies to denying that there is any god at all. There are deeper metaphysical arguments about the nature of reality of course, but my point is that we don’t function beyond our psychological nature so we cannot insist our claims are universally valid. To do so is at best impertinent and at worst deluded – and hence injurious to our shared wellbeing.

So, claims about the supremacy of a god can only ever be an expression of a believer’s psychological state. Hence insistence upon universal validity is not only psychologically ‘primitive’ it is also aggressive. It is a kind of tribal mentality where uniformity has survival value. It is not applicable to large complex communities.

Aggressive claims of universal validity seem also to be a response to a perceived existential threat. Conservative religious fundamentalists whose mindset is distinctly tribal legitimately feel under threat by modernity which is promoting non-tribal values. These are more humanist, secular, and inclusive. In a sense they are also more psychologically sophisticated. The tension caused by the mismatch between motives for assertion of universal validity of beliefs and levels of psychological sophistication is a genuine cause for concern. But it cuts both ways. Materialistic atheism is also an extremist and intolerant universalist position.

The antidote to aggressive tribalism’s claims of universal validity isn’t ridicule or employ overly rational counterargument. It’s something more subtle and sensitive than current opponents to such extreme passions seem presently be able to muster. Part of the problem is that opponents wrongly assert their position is more rational. It isn’t. It’s just that their psychological position is different – and maybe more in line with desired values to enable peaceful collective living. Secularists do tend to be more disposed to inclusive principles than do many religious. In fact, we could assert that the values Jesus espoused have escaped formal religion and entered the secular world where they are in harmony with a universal humanism.

Values and behaviors

Regardless of what we believe, our ability to live in harmony with others comes down to what we value and how we behave.

A materialist and a religious devotee can live in harmony perfectly well if they agree on key shared values and acceptable behaviors. This is how our complex pluralistic cultures operate these days – most of the time. What messes things up are extreme beliefs that are claimed to be universal – but without common assent.

If we understand that arguments don’t validate beliefs, only articulate them, we can learn that being distracted by them can weaken our chances of living in harmony with people who are not like us.

What we value as a community isn’t the same things we value as the foundation of a close friendship. The more intimate our relationships the more we prefer people who are like us in important ways. We can handle people who are not like us in our community provided they agree to certain standards of behaviour.

This is normal. This is how communities generally work. Attempts to impose universalistic beliefs usually end in conflict. Our normal is diversity and peaceful co-existence. But our ability to stretch that normal to accommodate unfamiliar and even novel forms of diversity can be tested. Adverse and extreme reactions against accommodating greater diversity tend to be expressed most strongly by those whose religious beliefs are asserted as universally valid.

We can believe what we like

When we understand that we craft beliefs to suit our psychological needs what we believe becomes way less important than our psychological integrity.

Our own understanding of the world impacts how we act in the world, but it doesn’t essentially alter how we behave – we just act through the filters of how that knowledge describes the world – and in accordance with our psychological state. The hint that this is true is to be found in history. Accounts from the ancient world are readily recognizable to us even though our technological development has been massive. Likewise, we have sci stories set in the far future, but they must have psychological themes we can relate to. We are all human and we share the same essential psychology whether we lived 7,000 years ago or 3,000 into the future. Same drama, just different sets and costumes.

Anthropology doesn’t reveal huge differences in the psychological states between stone-age hunter gatherers and middle-class inhabitants of contemporary cities. Our technologies and our knowledge stories may differ hugely, but our humanity is shared and familiar to us all. It has been cultural influences (religious and intellectual) that have created the illusion, and delusion, of inequity. The idea of race, for example is scarcely a few centuries old.

Our passion for reason has led us astray. We have come to see the reasoned argument as the measure of our intelligence. Hence highly educated people will argue for materialism or the Christian God with utter confidence in their reasoning.  What is characterized as a want of intelligence in their opponent is simply a different psychological disposition – developed by life experience and natural inclination.

I didn’t develop an affection for animism because the ideas I found appealed to my intellect, but because they accorded with my experience. I didn’t reason my way into what I now think. I got there because it made sense of my experiences. A religious faith will serve the needs of some, while faith in the dominion of reason will serve the needs of others.

Now, people develop beliefs for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with non-ordinary experiences. But what they elect to believe is still more determined by their psychological disposition than anything else. They will, of course, craft their beliefs in forms that reflect their appreciation of sensible argument is. The audience for agreeing this is the case tends to be selective – and confined to like-minded allies.

I have avoided the term ‘psychospiritual’ and just stuck with psychological because what applies to the spiritual also applies to the ‘secular’. There is no natural separate category – just what we create in our cultural contexts.

However, a useful guide is what is involved in spiritual training – the disciplining of our emotions and the quietening of the mind, as well as disciplining the imagination and favoring the valuing of personal authenticity. In some traditions significant intellectual training is also valued – but usually never instead of the personal psychological disciplines.

Traditions can become captured by culture so that disciplines of the mind are no more than establishing fidelity to dogma and tradition and personal discipline hardly progresses beyond obedience to rule and authority.  There’s a reason why, in some traditions, priests become purveyors of soulless doctrine and are sexual abusers.  Religion per se isn’t at fault here. It has the same vulnerability as any other human institution.

Conclusion

We must come to distinguish between beliefs as description of how the world works (according to culture, tradition and individual psychological dispositions) and beliefs about values and behaviors that have universal application.

Think the ‘golden rule’ of ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ This is reflected in rules of hospitality, ways of pragmatically living together, the Buddhist ideal of compassion, the Christian ideal of loving your neighbor – and simple intelligent self-preservation.

In the Roman Empire people from diverse religious backgrounds came together, and pragmatically paid homage to Roman deities as required. They lived together in relative harmony because what somebody else believed didn’t matter. Were they good community members? Were the good neighbors?

Early Christians caused bother when they declined to be equally pragmatic. They were persecuted, as a result. That exclusive intolerance has travelled with the faith ever since – with varying degrees of adverse consequences.

I am writing this on my iPhone. I have a grip disability that makes this device a blessing to me. I love science and I love tech. They have made my life better in countless ways. But science isn’t a foundation for explaining human experience – yet. I do think it will get there in a few centuries of intellectual and cultural evolution.

We are still in a ‘boy’s world’ sense of bravado in which intellect is king and emotions are ‘girly things’ to be avoided and denied. But things are changing. I am a fan of The Psychology Podcast which shows me the younger generation is acknowledging the power and validity of our emotional (read psychological) selves. This is a refreshing and vital evolution.

In important ways contemporary psychological research not only validates the essential themes of Buddhism (compassion) and Christianity (love) it sets out pathways for being nicer and kinder with no connection to religion or spirituality at all. You don’t need religion now to be a good community member or a good neighbor. Contemporary psychological and moral insights do the job nicely.

Why bother with religion then? In terms of what it means to be a decent human being that has never been the primary function of religion. This has been woven into religion because it has been part of a holistic discourse on the human condition that has embraced the range of human behaviour.

Religion as we know it began with the animistic sense that our reality was dynamic and conscious, and we humans needed to understand how to relate to it- as a community more than as an individual. In fact, considering the individual’s experience is a very modern notion.

The idea that reality requires us to develop a relationship with it isn’t weird. It is implicit in the religious and materialistic worldviews – just expressed in very different ways. We develop different knowledge stories that reflect our particular psychological filters of our experience, communities and cultures.

But neither materialism nor Christianity (and this may be true for other faiths – I just don’t know enough about them to comment) creates a sensible space for an individual to develop a coherent and effective relationship with that reality. That’s not to say they can’t – because they do that for some – just not many. These days the personal experience is paramount. Traditional communities of thought and belief are less influential – and are poorly equipped to cater to individual needs. New communities are forming, of course.

I found, via animism, a scant foothold on a system of thought that made sense to me. Animism is an out-of-date idea now. But it hasn’t yet been replaced with a superior set of ideas – at least not in an easy to find and digest form. I think we are evolving new ways of understanding the human condition. There are no knowledge certainties, but there are fairly universal values and behaviors that guide well in how to share our communities with others.

I find myself liking the secular more because it meets my values needs – how to be a nice person and why this matters – way better than any religious text. There are universal human attributes that stand in their own account and don’t now need religious texts – though once that was the only source of understanding our subjective/psychological nature. In the past religion, law, and tradition guided families and communities. All three have been evolving for the past few millennia, and we must adapt – as we mostly do.

What is left is the fascinating range of thinking about the nature of reality. The idea that any religious or materialist thinker has a definitive rational opinion is naive. At best they have ideas that appeal to people of particular psychological dispositions. We have diversity because we are diverse. Reality is big enough to accommodate the range of our ideas and opinions.

The cult of reason has turned thinking into a contest – and while this has been useful in evolving our rational understanding of practical things it is a poor model for social and communal thought, which is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive.

When it comes to the region of metaphysics, especially, we must step back and remind ourselves that this is a collaboration and not a contest. We are all discovering the nature of reality via our efforts to be less and less self-referential.

It’s time to stop pointless contestation and pay more attention to living together. That won’t solve the problem – but it may get us going in a better direction.

Arguing about beliefs has led to brutal and pointless wars, and to the persecution, torture and murder of community members. We have invaded and enslaved peoples we have believed inferior with a righteous zeal.

Adherents to universalist beliefs are now excusing conduct that was once unimaginable and inexcusable as they defend against a perceived threat. We can do better than make matters worse for them by making that threat more concrete. Even the ‘good guys’ are now being unkind, insensitive, and arrogant. It’s not just the religious conservative under stress. It’s hard for us all.

I think there are gods, but that’s another discussion.

Some useful resources

There is an abundance of podcasts that help us think better, more modestly, and behave better toward others. They are a kind of secular spirituality in that they celebrate the human spirit in a kind and inclusive way.  Below I have listed a few that I esteem (the list is by no means exhaustive, and I have no doubt there are many excellent ones I don’t know about).

• Rethinking with Adam Grant
• You Are not So Smart
• No Stupid Questions
• To The Best of Our Knowledge
• Ideas – CBC
• The Thinking Mind Podcast
• Expanding Mind
• Freakonomics Radio

For those interested in pushing metaphysical boundaries there are a couple of YouTube channels. There are also several YouTube channels that examine religious beliefs and traditions with a strong scholarly foundation. As above, this list is neither definitive nor exhaustive.

• The Monroe Institute
• The Other Side NDE
• Mythvision
• Data Over Dogma
• Gresham College
• Search – Where Do Deity Concepts Come From?
• Search – Jeffrey Kripal
• Search – Bernardo Kastrup