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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

Introduction

The term ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ (SBNR) is a popular way of making a distinction about one’s personal feelings and the social phenomenon of religion. It draws a distinction between the positive aspects of being spiritual and the negative associations we attribute to religion. By ‘we’ I mean those who have discarded any affection for religions which offend against our spiritual sensibilities. 

I have written elsewhere about religion done well or badly. There are good reasons to discard a religion which can seem to more a source of strife than a source of succour. But religion done badly doesn’t mean that religion per se is beyond redemption.

Here I want to make it plain that I do not intend to defend religion as it is presently practiced, but the idea itself. There are many things done badly – food, sex, poetry etc. But we would not insist that any of those should be utterly damned because of this, surely.

The emergence of the individual

The idea of religion is modern, and it has been evolving for centuries. When the word was framed it had a meaning related to personal connection with the gods. The exact meaning of the original idea – religio – is disputed.

Wikipedia tells us that: “The Latin term religiō, the origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin), is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the end of the Roman Republic, notably by Cicero, in the sense of “scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus“. In classic antiquity, it meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty towards anything and was used mostly in secular or mundane contexts. In religious contexts, it also meant the feelings of “awe and anxiety” caused by gods and spirits that would help Romans “live successfully”.

Cicero thought in terms of adherence to traditional family-based ‘cults’ (not what we call cults these days). Others thought in terms of obligation/duty in a mundane sense. For others it concerned consciousness of the presence of gods and spirits.

The word has connections of binding to, connection with, obligation toward, suggesting that the connection between the human and the divine was understood as non-optional. It was a duty that covered the whole of a person’s life. In essence religio isn’t distinct from our sense of spirituality.

What has fundamentally changed in the past couple of millennia is the evolution of the individual. How we understand what individuality is has, however, become toxic in recent decades. This has been the consequence of predatory commercial interests that are intent on creating the idea of separation. It has intensified under the stampede to exploit ‘youth culture’ in the past 4 decades.

Individually is not separation. The term ‘no man is an island…’ reflects this. It is better to understand individuality as an intensification or particularisation of awareness – especially self-awareness. That intensification can overwhelm awareness of connection – especially in times of intense change. 

Psychologically we are utterly ill-suited to actual separation. But we have evolved away from being deeply locked into family – in which we were no more than part of that larger whole. Now that particularisation dominates our sense of identity.

As a result, we are less disposed to participate in spiritual practices and communities that hark back to how things used to be. This is quite apart from the well-testified to failings of institutional religious culture, theology, and apologetics.

Individuality is still poorly understood, but it helps if we remember it is about intensification, not separation. Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual remains, in my view, as a landmark exploration of the theme.

Spirituality and religion aren’t separate things

While the distinction reflects an understandable aspiration, we must not assume that spirituality is inherently virtuous. Spiritual practices and beliefs can be just as offensive to rational and moral standards. There are ‘spiritual’ cults, for example, which manifest the same kind of offenses attributed to traditional religion.

For this reason, we are better off distinguishing been spirituality/religion done well or done badly rather than trying to craft problematic definitions that make the moral distinctions we desire.

So, let us allow that ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ is well-intentioned but essentially meaningless, and potentially badly misleading. We must remember that being ‘spiritual’ isn’t an assurance of anything of any value. Were it otherwise we would not have the abusive cults that lure, trap, and abuse so many.

What matters then?

Even the idea of doing something well or badly isn’t especially useful until we have a clear understanding of what relative merit means in this context.

Dan McClellan, one of the co-hosts of the Data Over Dogma podcast, is a biblical scholar who I see regularly on YouTube. He makes the vital point that the Bible is a resource a Christian can employ to frame their faith in ways that serve their individual dispositions. In effect, you can be religious or spiritual in a Christian sense and exhibit vastly different values than other Christians. The Spiritual But Not Religious have access to a far greater set of resources than Christians and can be equally wildly divergent in their perspectives.

In short, no matter how we define ourselves we can draw on abundant resources and ‘authorities’ to substantiate what we believe – and what we think of ourselves.

A Christian (current or former) will maybe interpret my selection of Genesis 1:26-27, Acts 17-28, John 15, and Matthew 22:34-40 to assess my take on Christian sources in many ways. But they can’t argue against my freedom to do so other than by insisting their interpretation trumps mine. The point I am making is that even as a non-Christian I can selectively dip into the faith source material to construct a set of ideas that speak to my spiritual ideals. 

In the same way a religious believer could select from the great array of spiritual sources ideas that might reinforce their beliefs. What none of us may be able to do is find confirmation of any claim of exclusivity or unique claim to divine revelation, sanction, or blessing. Such an idea is essentially what should be kept as a private conceit of singular community or tradition. We humans all like to imagine that what is ours is better than anybody else’s. Mostly it is gentle and harmless conceit, but it can become brutal and oppressive.

How do we define religion or spirituality?

The Australian social psychologist, Hugh Mackay, observes in The Way We Are (2024) that we have a variety of ‘gods’. Hugh isn’t theorising. His professional life has been listening to people talking about what they think, feel, and believe. Those ‘gods’ may be ill-defined and idiosyncratic, but they encompass the spectrum of our passions – sacred and secular.

The distinction between sacred and secular is personal and contextual. Neither exist as an independent category. This is something those heavily invested in their beliefs will recoil at. Its good to think that what you believe has objective independent validity.

There is abundant evidence that human psychology is inherently spiritual or religious. But that doesn’t mean that we have to believe what others believe. It means that there is an inherent inclination to create an existential sense of connection with reality. How we then express that is an entirely different matter. You can be an adherent to a faith tradition, a follower of any number of ‘spiritual’ ideas and philosophies, an atheist, or a materialist. This psychological impulse isn’t dependent on what we believe. But it is shaped and populated by our experiences – on a personal level, and on a cultural level.

My early research into animism convinced me that our ancestors looked upon their reality as a conscious thing. The key concern of the animistic awareness was the relationship with realty must exist for it to survive or thrive. Our culture’s materialistic discourse, along with Christian theology, has done a lot to disrupt that sense of essential relationship. It really wasn’t until the advent of materialism that the idea of reality being made up of just ‘dead’ matter and energy took hold. For many our sense of reality is now a disrupted and fragmented confusion of many powerful relationships [personal, communal, cultural, and material] that compete for attention and primacy.

Our intellectual and religious institutions have created an extreme demand that any such relationship must be mediated by science or theology and must be validated by either. We have learned to distrust our own senses. The cultural discourse that dominates us suggests that dogmatic science and theology share a concern for control – and compete for ultimate power.

This desire for control contrasts against the evolving impetus of individuals wanting their own sense of relationship. Individuals have a more nuanced desire for relationship [with whatever their sense of the whole is] than any general community can create. The impulse to exert social control at an existential level is now beyond its use by date. There was a time when this was fair enough, but no more.

So, we have come to see religion as about social control and spirituality as about individual expression. One is burdened by historic baggage and the other an anticipation of relational freedom – impaired by little understanding of what that really means.

What about the idea of God?

There’s some fascinating academic work being done on the roots of the Christian idea of God, showing the evolution from a polytheistic origin to a supreme being which is part polytheistic inflation and in part mystical idealism. There is no real point in taking the Christian God literally, because it embodies a collection of conceived states.

The subject of God or gods is contentious, depending on what ideas you have been exposed to. Even going back an early stage of Christianity and Islam, and among some Jewish mystics there was a sense that God was beyond imagination and conception. This was the ‘One’, the ‘All’ – the absolute ground of all being. For a monotheist this was all that was needed. Except that this God was imagined and conceived in very concrete terms – idols crafted from the mind and imagination.

Polytheistic traditions had the same absolute ground of all being but allowed that there were gods and goddesses. They were ‘of the One, not as the One’ as I was firmly told by a teacher. The distinction is critical.

There may be good reasons for a community to shift from a polytheistic to a monotheistic theology. That might include social control at a time when that was the best option for a community’s survival. Bring everyone together under a shared way of seeing things. But, regardless of any such imperative there is no absolutely compelling reason to insist on such a perspective.

No religious perspective can exist with a single divine agency. Christianity has its archangels, angels, the trinity, its saints, Jesus and his mother. That’s a substantial community of beings in service of the One God. We must remember that gods and goddesses are just our names for agents. They are not fixed definitions.

In short, any conception of the divine is supported by an ecosystem of agents who will be named and described by individual traditions to fit their interpretations and histories.

But are there really such divine agents? So much depends upon what we believe and experience. Not all claimed agents are as they as said to be. Many are no more than the ardent mistaken or delusional fantasies of believers.

Conclusion

We have an innate desire to feel existentially connected to our reality. If our sense of our reality is mediated by faith traditions, then that sense of connection will attempt to work through our traditions [this applies to secular culture as well]. 

Some may be driven by an inner desire to build a connection in a manner that tradition, history, and culture do not accommodate or even tolerate. That desire must, and will, find satisfaction through individual expression.

However, we must remember that this impulse works through sacred and secular modes of expression. We cannot maintain a balance if we assume that our singular focus must be on the sacred. This is of great importance these days because there is so much valid new knowledge about our condition and nature that is being developed in the secular sphere. The separation into sacred and secular is a context-dependent distinction we make to express our values about relationships we have in our sense of reality. It is not objective.

The thing about seeing ourselves as individuals is that our sense of relationship with the divine must evolve away from the tribal/communal sense toward a more universal sense, and this takes a lot of adjustment. It is unsettling because we are progressively taking responsibility for that relationship – and we can’t continue to shelter behind beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes that leave us dependent upon authority and tradition.

For some the individualistic path will be travelled in good company. For a few it might be more solitary – not because it is a case of separation or isolation but because the challenges may be too intense or particular to fit well in a group. But there’s always the companionship of divine agents – as teachers or guides – though we may not always be aware of their presence.

Ultimately, we choose the language we use. You may prefer not use religious to describe yourself because of how others may interpret that, or because you retain adverse memories and feelings associated with the word. Saying I am “Spiritual But Not Religious” is still meaningful, still useful.

Introduction

It has been a while since I have read any of Temple’s work so I was keen to get into A New Science of Heaven (2022). I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a survey of scientific ideas variously ignored by ‘mainstream’ science or suppressed by interests with the motive and power to do so.

The central theme is plasma. Temple argues that this is the dark matter, which constitutes 90% of the cosmos. Physical matter makes up the other 10%. That’s interestingly how the Kabbalistic Tree of Life might be interpreted – with the lowest of the ten sephirah, Malkuth, being the sole expression of physicality.

Plasma is, apparently, potentially non-organic life and the seat of considerable intelligence. But its not remote from us, as one might assume from a Tree of Life image. Rather it is intimately connected to our experience of physical being. Our souls are plasma? They must be something.

For me this description of plasma filled in gaps in my imagination and thinking about my long history of non-ordinary experiences and the idea of animism. This is what I want to reflect on below. I want to be clear that this is my reaction, as I digest what I have encountered in the book. You won’t find the ideas I discuss in the book itself, save maybe a few mentioned in the context of Temple discussing ignored or suppressed science.

Being and location

The huge idea that hit me was a reminder of an idea found in Acts 17:28 – ‘that great being in whom we live and move and have our being’. I had come across this idea when I was training in ritual magic and wasn’t aware it was in the Bible until I searched for it while writing this post.

We live in a great being. Christians have long insisted that God is apart from his creation, so it is kinda contradictory and confusing. Our bodies are pretty much a community of many lives, so the notion that we dwell in a ‘great being’ obeys that Hermetic idea – ‘as above, so below’.

So, the idea that there are vast plasma entities in which we live isn’t novel. Nor is it radical. For me the novelty is adding a more concrete concept to replace what was just a vague metaphysical notion.

It seems to me that we exist in a plasma substratum within which physical reality is like the seeds we find in various fruits. What may be remote from our awareness or senses isn’t remote from our being. Our physical being exists in a medium – like a seed in the flesh of a fruit.

My imagination is, I think, contaminated by the idea of space – as a void of some kind. Perhaps the habituation from Christianity and materialism has made me think in terms of isolation and separation from the essence of our being. The Christian God is mostly seen as remote – as an artisan rather than being infused in that which he created. But Acts 17:28 has a different meaning. Its not a huge step from a remote god to no god.

Animistic consciousness is essentially an expression of that essential assertion – we dwell in primal conscious being. The image of the divine artisan creating things misleads us. Better the divine imaginer who crafts from their own conscious essence agencies that remain within that essence. That must be our fundamental reality. It makes more sense. It solves problems that exist when we think in terms of separation and isolation.

Animistic consciousness is fundamentally relational. When you have agency, intent, and will, how you behave in relation to others possessing the same attributes matters a great deal. And because lives/spirits are interconnected there is an imperative to navigate the complexity of any ecosystem competently – and with compassion, gentleness, and wisdom.

Horizontal and vertical dimensions

I know there are dimensions of being that are beyond those I can engage with via my physical senses. But my ability to describe them is limited for several reasons. The first is that from the perspective of my sense of physical being I do not have highly functioning senses that reach into what I call the meta-physical dimension. I have limited conscious sensory ability in that dimension. The second is that there is an innate limitation imposed upon humans. We are here to experience physical life (horizontal) rather than the spectrum of meta-physical realities (horizontal). Those experiences are confined to shamans, mystics and those blessed/cursed with ‘special gifts’. 

Those ‘gifted’ souls are permitted awareness of things unseen for reasons not evident, usually. Some are granted steady and reliable access. Others have fragmentary, almost taunting, exposure for ‘educational’ purposes (or so I am told).

The reality of the vertical dimensions isn’t in dispute – unless you want to be churlishly argumentative – in which case you have no place here in this conversation. Every human community for as long as we can know has asserted not only the presence of the meta-physical, but its primacy as the source of causation.

The idea of plasma beings in primary and secondary forms which hold our physical reality gives us a way of understanding that what seems to us to be invisible is part of a spectrum of the continuity of being. The spirits of my experience don’t exist in a vague dimension no more substantial than imagination or faith but in a complex reality that is more essential to the nature of things than my physical awareness of being can affirm.

When it is acknowledged as real, the opportunity to know more opens up. When it is imagined as comprehensible reality that knowing becomes more concrete. The idea of plasma beings has ‘thickened’ my sense of what enfolds and holds me. I feel more connected.

Of gods and other beings

Monotheism makes us silly. There is, necessarily, one ultimate unified Being to which all other beings are subordinate. But to imagine this is the God of the Christians is to be mistaken, and wildly conceited.

Sound scholarship has provided very good evidence that the God of the Christians has evolved from a polytheistic tradition via culturally motivated promotion to supremacy. It’s not unknown – and the truth is deflating. The hint is that this supreme God is still treated like a member of a polytheistic community. The other hint is that the supreme deity is always spoken of in terms awe – ‘unknowable’, ‘unimaginable’, – as The One or The All. This isn’t the Christian God, save in the mouths of mystics.

This One or All isn’t the god of believers. Their gods may exist, but they are “of the One, not as the One” (as I was firmly told). And I say ‘may’ because the idea of plasma permits us to imagine vast conscious intelligent agents who may interact with humans as part of an intentional purpose – or which may be crafted from our collective imagining.

Plasma beings may even collaborate with human imagination to frame a presence and a relationship that serves our needs – and theirs. Either that or our ideas of gods might be entirely our own. It’s a bit like unrequited love in a way. The object of our desire is real, but the relationship is simple fantasy.

I have encountered a ‘god’ presence. It was in the form of an intense radiation whose impact put me on the floor and left me struggling to stay conscious. It was a shared experience. It was sudden and not sought. There was a communication as well. And it was repeated. The experience is, for me, beyond dispute. That is to say that it happened. The explanation of it I still accept only provisionally. I can’t verify the explanation, and because I am a deep sceptic I don’t have grounds to develop a settled opinion.

The explanation that it might have been a plasma being greatly appeals to me. That makes huge sense. But that doesn’t progress the ‘who’ side of the question. The ‘why’ side still bugs me too.

Gods as plasma beings make immense sense to me. Spirits of all kinds as plasma beings is also really attractive. The idea that our fundamental nature – who we are in essence – is plasma deeply appeals.

I like the idea that our fundamental nature is plasma. That fits with my experiences in engaging with deceased parents. It fits with my OOBE experience. That was just the one – with verification. It was educational and not an indulgence. So, life is essentially inorganic and not dependent on physical matter? That makes sense.

What do we know?

I have grown up on a mixed diet – Christianity, the whole smorgasbord of New Age woo, heavy duty occult and esoteric thought, an abundance of science (material and human), philosophy and etc. 

Now and then I have encountered keystone ideas which have radically transformed my thinking. Back in 2004 it was encountering the idea of animism, which, for some reason, I had either missed or ignored for decades. In 2024 it is plasma. That’s 20 years between inspirations. But I don’t know if that is fast or slow.

I don’t expect the reader to be as excited as I am. I am on my own journey of discovery which opens up doors or kicks me in the backside as spirit decides I need it. I have come to acknowledge that I live a spirit enmeshed life. I don’t mean that in any breathless sense. It’s more like I am stupid and non-material agents are prodding me along in the desperate hope that I might come to my senses. Why me? I have no idea.

Temple’s book reminded me how much remains excluded from the discourse of our reality (yes, there are other sources too). He is talking about genuine science, not speculation rooted in nothing more than fancy. We have two sources of truth – our direct experience and trusted reports from those engaging in empirical research. Even so that’s still a vulnerable foundation. We must be careful.

Beyond that there’s a strange world of passions and power. Communities and cultures have always had their gatekeepers whose function has been to protect the dominant discourse from disruption. There were times when that was a matter or survival for the whole community. Now it seems that what is being protected is what a minority believe. Are they right? Like a Facebook relationship status – it’s complicated. Every time I speculate, I discover another aspect to a potential explanation.

Access to high quality knowledge and ideas is essential as we evolve how we understand our place in our reality, and its nature. We need a new understanding of our spirituality – one grounded in science – as befits our times.

Temple’s discussion of plasma acknowledges that a good deal of research is hidden from public awareness. Fair enough, up to a point. Plasma offers a way of comprehending the UPA phenomenon – and that exposes us to an existential trauma – especially for materialists and hard-core Christians. Neither group is comfortable with the potential. Should we all be denied access to critical insight because they are freaking out? I don’t know and won’t be tempted to offer an opinion. We need to think about what is knowable and known in a sensible manner.

Conclusion

Temple’s book is a watershed moment for me because it triggers a host of thoughts that activated by the idea of plasma beings. It fills in gaps and completes inferential loops. It links science with ancient lore. I love how ideas about dark matter mesh with the Kabbala’s Tree of Life. It restores my faith in a sense of fundamental elegance in how we evolve our knowledge. I expect science to confirm spiritual truths. 

By itself Temple’s book can seem like a lonely lighthouse on a dark materialistic sea. But seeing it as a member of a community of ‘non-conforming’ thought it is more like a pilot boat navigating our present troubled waters.

We are collectively in an awkward place. We are moving more into a post-Christian culture. I am deliberate in saying ‘post-Christian’ rather than ‘anti-Christian’. We are moving away from times when demanding conformity of thought was socially valued. We are moving away from the naïve existential muddling as Christian thought struggled to grasp the implications of the idea of individualism that was triggered by the faith’s inception. That has taken a few millennia – and that’s neither too slow nor too fast, given what that transition means on an evolutionary scale.

The idea of plasma doesn’t take us anywhere new. What it does is affirm what we have always known – but helps us escape the straightjackets of religious and scientific dogmas that edit out key ideas.

For me what was especially potent was the notion that plasma restored the idea of ether – something that had been refuted by scientific thought for a few centuries. I have allowed that ancient thought hasn’t always been affirmed by contemporary science, so I have been prepared to suspend speculation on ideas as a consequence. That allowance isn’t an assumption of error, just that, absent contemporary evidence I can’t think through some ideas in a contemporary way. That matters to me. The past is a different country to where I live. It is a bank of knowledge and ideas I withdraw from, but I must convert what I take into currency suited to my present.

Temple’s book is a conversion tool. I am immensely grateful for that. It has put the ethers back on the table, and then taken that idea to a very different level for me.

Note 1: Since finishing the book, I have been practicing sensing a non-physical substantiality around me. Early days but there’s a trending sensation of feeling distinctly being in a ‘thicker’ medium. I remember Broomhill speaking of thin and thick time and this is something similar. Thick time is more spirit infused – more soup than plain water. There are cycles of lower and higher intensity and I think this is a high intensity period for me. This doesn’t mean that I will return to the same kind of thinness as before. The base awareness always grows. The high intensity will drop back to regular intensity with an added degree. I guess.

Note 2: I am also reacting to an intense re-examination of what I belief is. I started inquiring about the nature of belief in late 2018 when I became intrigued by Donald Trump. Why did so many people think he was plausible? Like a mug I thought a quick 6 months of research would answer my questions. In late April 2024 I am still inquiring. The idea of plasma has just sent an earthquake-like shock through what I had thought was a decent conception. Back to the drawing board.

Temple’s book could disrupt your mindset – if you let it. It could, like an earthquake, throw your ideas into a mess on the floor, so when you pick them up there is a new order and new unknowns to be chased down.

Introduction

I recently listened to an audiobook – The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again -by Justin Brierley. Brierley thinks the present ebbing of Christianity in western cultures is about to change. That’s okay. He is an apologist, and this is his job. But this isn’t going to happen.

The book explores the decline of the kind of muscular atheism expressed by materialists, and it is true that a handful of intellectuals have discovered some value in traditional Christianity. Some have abandoned atheism for Christianity. There’s nothing remarkable about that. This has been going on for years. Changing camps goes both ways. People find what they need.

The title is somewhat misleading. Not all professions of atheism are hard core. So much is a reaction against Christianity in its intolerant dogmatic expression. For some it’s enough to just abandon the faith. For others there is a progressive rediscovery of some idea of the divine free from dogma and tradition.

There is a trend showing more people are saying they are not aligned to any religion. The category ‘spiritual but not religious’ has been growing steadily in recent decades. The Pew Research Centre has some interesting data from December 2023. This is US data. Overall, 70% of Americans say they are spiritual, including 22% who say they are spiritual but not religious. Around 28% say they have no religious affiliation (atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular’).

Interestingly a Jan 2024 Pew report notes that 41% have become more spiritual, whereas 13% have become less so. But while 24% say they have become more religious, 33% say they have become less religious.

The trend seems clear, more people are becoming more spiritual but less religious. Brierley’s hopeful prognosis for Christianity seems far more optimistic than realistic.

Growing beyond formal religion

Pew notes that, “An overwhelming majority of U.S. adults (83%) say they believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. And 81% say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.”

The trend isn’t away from spiritual beliefs, only from the organisations and cultures which once held dominant sway over the community. This trend might include solo DIY spirituality, membership of groups and communities – everything from yoga classes to wiccan covens or occult orders. In essence, being spiritual has increasingly little or nothing to do with religious affiliation.

Over the past few months, I have been moved to get into books on alternative perspectives on our spiritual influences. The list isn’t exhaustive of what is available, only what I have read/listened to recently.

• TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis
• The Sacred History: How Angels, Mystics and Higher Intelligence Made Our World by Jonathan Black
• Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences: Explorations with UFOs, Dreams, Angels, AI and Other Dimensions by D. W. Pasulka
• Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester
• Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice by Mitch Horowitz
• Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion by Nicholas Spencer

The compelling takeaway for me was the reminder of just how strongly esoteric and occult thought has influenced western culture since the birth of the Renaissance, and especially since the 19^th century.

The idea that Christianity has dominated the evolution of spiritual and moral values in western culture over the past 1700 years is deeply misleading. This is not to say Christianity has had no significant influence, but it does add a dimension on why Christianity’s influence has significantly declined in the past 150 years.

Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalismis a compelling account of how Christianity contributed the evolution of Western secular liberalism and the rise of individuality. In a way it is a description of how the faith made itself redundant. It had a use by date, which has come due for many of us.

Formal religious organisations have been losing their appeal in our contemporary times steadily. In part it is reliance on anachronistic content that is poorly attuned to our times. You can’t effectively communicate resolutions to contemporary issues by relying on 2,000-year-old stories. They can be a guide but not a solution. In part it is also the manifest moral failings by ordained representatives. Ordination has been proven to be no assurance of integrity – rendering the ceremony no more than an administrative performance to be randomly interpreted at an individual level. In essence an organisation saturated in the past, avoidant of contemporary knowledge, and unwilling to fully engage with current reality cannot survive, let alone thrive.

The issue isn’t the moral dimension. Religions have no ownership of morality, as biological and psychological research shows. They can shape it, but not always in accordance with contemporary expectations.

Religions create a social discourse that frames ethical and moral imperatives in that social dimension. Our biology and psychology trigger moral values independent of religions and their cultural and historic foundations. This is why there is a clash between ‘progressive’ values and religious values. Attempts to assert ownership of, or primacy over, moral values will fail without force to impose that ownership. That force has been countered by the emergence of more democratic, liberal, and inclusive values – especially in the past 60 years.

The role of formal religion was once central to a community’s survival. But that has changed as our communities have become larger, more complex, more diverse, and more concerned about meeting internal needs of harmony and inclusion. The idea that religions might thrive by resisting the forces of social evolution is absurd. This is why formal religions have become more aligned to ‘conservative’ values as our communities continue to evolve toward more tolerant and inclusive pluralism.

Conclusion

I quit Christianity when I was 6. I was obliged, under threat of physical chastisement, to attend Sunday school when I was 5. When I chastised my father for being unforgiving, I was hauled off to church, away from the influence of Jesus. I liked Jesus. He was a very nice man, way nicer than my father who was somewhat disturbed. But I wasn’t sent to Sunday school to learn to be like Jesus apparently. I was removed from the light of love to the darkness of spiritual anger and tribal drams. I loathed the church, and I loathed the unloving self-righteous people who infested it.

I couldn’t fully live out my quitting for another 4 years, after my parent split. And then it was total. I retained an affection for my Sunday school Jesus. I had nothing against him, and there was a lot to like. But I can’t imagine a 2024 Jesus being anything less than totally contemporary, speaking in terms anybody would fully understand. I imagine he would be fully familiar with current psychology, science, and philosophy.

I esteem the wisdom of the ages deeply. That is my bedrock upon which I have built my present search for spiritual insight. But that search is crafted from the best contemporary knowledge I can find. In what we call the humanities is an extraordinary wealth of knowledge and insight whose interpretation is energetically contested by materialists and the religious (dogmatists and open-minded inquirers) as well as the spiritual but not religious. Nothing is settled.

That contestation is the healthy way knowledge grows and individuals mature psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. We all seek fulfilment of our own inner needs. But we must now understand that in the diversity of human experience conformity to dogma is no longer the way for all.

There is now no dominant authority of tradition or dogma – only the petty efforts of those who crave it for their shelter. They are a natural part of the diversity of inquirers. There is a larger, loose, and complex community of knowledge-seekers and truth-lovers contributing to an ever-evolving discourse. We can all find what we desire and/or need.

Who knows where things are going, and how they will evolve along the way. There is no doubt individuals will find what they seek, and the company of fellow travellers to celebrate and affirm what they value. But will we see future spiritual organisations exerting power over communities through dominating dogma and force? Maybe in some distant time.

In the meantime, we have plenty of dogma free inquiry and exploration to relish and celebrate.