Neo Religion

The trivial fact that you can read this sentence makes you a serious freak.  It is historically abnormal to read. Print literacy is only a couple hundred years old and the :linear alphabet is dated merely to the 2nd millennium BCE, fairly recent.  By contrast, most human cultural activity — including religion — took place during the previous hundreds of thousands of years in which anatomically modern humans existed without scriptures, cities or :formal social organizations.

So the handful of religions that “believe” in the moral and :cosmological assertions of sacred written texts — as found in :Buddhism, :Hinduism, :Judaism, :Islam, :Christianity, :Mormonism, :Scientology, etc. — are perhaps a comparatively new and non-representative variant of ancient human religious activity.  While these “-isms” (which contain both the best and worst of humanity) have become the popular mascots of religiousness, even treated as such by :atheistic anti-religionists, we must begin to think more broadly if we are going to understand the religious needs and opportunities for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

Alongside the well known world traditions, which the anthropologist :Jean Gebser called “mythic-membership” religions, we must add the great diversity of prehistoric ritual and :spiritplay.  We must also include the ongoing :emergence of new sects and the full suite of quasi-sacred activity that takes place outside formal label of religion.
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That last category is essential.  Perhaps only a tiny minority of human religious activity has occurred among people who would have self-identified as “religious.” We cannot pretend to be engaged in a serious study if we build our definitions out of socialized self-assertions.  No competent zoologist would accept a tortoise’s claim to be an artichoke.  A natural species is defined by its structure and function within an ecosystem — not by social identity-labels.
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So the definition of religion used in this article is something like this:
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The set of :interpersonal practices that elevates a cultural field (ethos) to the empowering experience of divinity.  It is a cultural condition capable of the participatory :co-evocation of an :existentially satisfying, inspirational and :intersubjective “Spirit.”

This Spirit may be perceived alternatively as a force, entity or :deeper self but, regardless of the interpretive lens that is deployed, it has :superlative phenomenological characteristics.  It might be described as a :surplus numinous coherence that can be felt as an enlivening force between people.  This phenomenon can be encountered in visions, pondered, poeticized, :invoked for moral and wisdom-training purposes, :evoked by private and public ritual, projected into images, words, locations, objects, species, ideas and individuals — and communed with directly as an affective accelerant of self-deepening and self-authentication.  Arguably, this is simply the well-functioning hum of the organic cultural engine.

This superlative degree of cultural experience is very good for us.  We need each other and we also need the psychological, physiological, organizational and motivational benefits that emerge when successful :religionization occurs in the style of any particular cultural, historical and technological niche.
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Without this shared, creative and :supra-meaningful activity we not only lose individual access to the :psychobiological and developmental benefits of faithfulness but we collectively become impotent in the face of :meaning crises. The emergent wholeness of a culture, people or civilization is necessary in order to fuel a shared :antifragile identity and to mobilize collectively to implement social changes outside the habitual and highly incentivized range of business-as-usual.

The production of this shared :coherence and supra-meaningfulness, whether within an existing tradition or among those who do not define themselves as religious, requires an adequate :interblending of all the basic organs of a culture’s :metaphorical body.  Thus one of the main indicators that religiousness is actually succeeding is that its practices, :ethos and :imaginal rituals are broadly shared among the wealthy and poor, men and women, liberals and conservatives, :cis and trans, etc.  And to evoke a wholeness-that-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts you first need to interweave, incorporate and harmonize all the parts.  That includes science.
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This might sound odd initially because we understand that the challenging appearance of modern, liberal :rationalist-internationalists was historically met with strong emotional resistance from certain traditional communities.  The modern need to think freely and escape from :conformist oppression provoked a sometimes ferocious traditionalist backlash which, in turn, caused many :modernists to subscribe to the concept of a great battle between religion and scientific enlightenment.  This is an unfortunate historical contingency that does not properly describe the general relationship between science and religion.  Under healthy, functional conditions, the sciences are always included and honored within religion.
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Consider the famous example of Medieval Catholic Christianity in Europe.  It strongly incorporated and promoted Aristotle’s physics and Ptolemy’s cosmological astronomy. 11th-century science is not at odds with 11th-century religion.  However, a dangerous and unnecessary gap opens when 11th century science is enforced in the 16th, 19th or 21st century.  This creates a significantly less religious situation — since one of the major social genres is being left out.  Religions that oppose contemporary science are perversely hobbled by their anxious denigration of one of their own primary limbs.  Therefore they become maladaptive in their niche and bring disrepute upon religiousness itself.
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The ability to incorporate contemporary and leading-edge science is a significant indicator of whether or not a religion is operative or degenerative.

A similar situation obtains in spiritual practice.

One of the other crucial genres of human activity, that must be taken intimately into the heart of religion in all ages, is that of spiritual practice.  An emphasis on orthodoxy at the expense of exoteric and esoteric :orthopraxy is one of the major indicators that religion has ceased to function and regressed into mere social politics, superstition and ideology.

The increasingly common contemporary mood that identifies itself as “spiritual but not religious” voices a highly pertinent complaint.  The complaint is that many people are not instinctively detecting any effective, healthy, historically appropriate and plausibly righteous social correlate of individual spiritual activity.  And a major contributing factor to this perception is simply that many religions do not make adequate room for individual development by privileging a full set of human :psychotechnologies.  When religions do not strongly foreground the domain of interior transformational techniques then people will seek these outside of religion — leading to a simultaneous diminishment of the status of religion and an undermining of the naturalized cultural embedding of inner methodologies.

The flourishing of spirit within a single person is analogous to the sacred degree of thriving in a community — except that there is a difference in the nature of the parts that are being integrated into the emergent wholeness.
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The individual correlate of a social genre is a subjective interior intelligence network.  There is for example a subjectively-active (i.e. it senses, feels, says “I”) interior network called thinking and another one called feeling.  There is one that orchestrates the agency of the neuromuscular and sensory system. We could also talk about :chakras, :sub-personalities, :left/right brains, :conscious and subconscious selves, the angels and devils on our shoulders, etc.

In all these cases, the spiritual proposal is that an individual can undertake certain lifestyles and :neuropsychological exercises which coordinate these often divergent systems into a greater degree of coherent wholeness that satisfies, enlivens and amplifies the capacity of the full spectrum individual.  These individuals live in such a way as to make peak experiences both deeper and more frequent, while making efforts to assimilate the results and adapt their lives to experiential revelations.  This constitutes the eternally (:sic) and justifiably praised spiritual “Way” that is described in various language across cultures and :epochs.  This is an essential and profound force in human affairs.
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And in order to have an authentic variant of religion, we must prominently integrate both scientific and spiritual praxis — at the expense of mere consensus or dogmatics in these domains.  If the interpersonal evocation of Spirit (religion) attempts to operate without validated contemporary information (science) or the wisdom gained from esoteric self-developmental activities (spirituality) then it almost certainly will undergo regressive collapse, emergent perversion or cultural marginalization.

While the purpose of this text is explicitly to recognize the importance of human religious activity, we cannot turn a blind eye to the ways in which religions have periodically operated in a pathological mode.

This might be hard to hear: authentic religion should not be :abusing children, :suppressing healthy organic instincts, :lobbying for social regression, :rejecting scientific and :esoteric practices, :propounding unnecessary wars, :excluding or marginalizing any major social group, :feeding on ignorance and paranoia, :aggressively propagandizing its cosmology, :interfering with ecological stability and biodiversity, :forcibly converting populations, or :inhibiting avant-garde arts and entertainments.

It is quite legitimate to call all that behavior fascistic or nihilistic regardless of whether it’s done by a formerly great religion, a political nation-state, your extended family or a high school soccer team.  Religion is not unique in how it suffers from :culturopathy.  Signs of ill-health, and the practices that lead to them, are reasonably common across different cultural contexts and domains of human life.

One significantly bad omen is the separation of authenticity from authority.  In politics, for example, it is dangerous and dysfunctional to :equate celebrity status with the kind of humane popularity that expresses the support of the collective body.  Likewise in religion, we must feel free to openly distinguish between the social authority bequeathed by an institutional role or a strong dose of performative public charisma from what might be thought of as actual religious capacity.
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Without careful discernment and authentication, any enterprise that mistakes “status” for “significance” will go downhill fast.

Yet the substitution of superficial simulations for realities is not the only factor that produces the degeneration of a cultural movement.  Religion also ossifies when it becomes either too reverent or too irreverent.  Serious play is required in order to be an authentic participant in human affairs.

General health concerns are also applicable to religion.  The bodies of participants must be nourished, flexible, protected and challenged.  Ethical behavior must be distinguished from mere self-justification and hierarchical distortion.  Therapeutic insights must be integrated so that negative feelings can be processed and utilized rather than suppressed and replaced with self-destructive assertions of hollow positivity or puritan moralizing.  Feminine and masculine styles must both be allowed to flourish alongside the normal range of the ambiguous human types who fall between or outside those symbolic polarities.  New cultural ideas should be enthusiastically explored but not naively adopted.  Effort and grace must be practiced in tandem.  Relationships should be deepened naturally.  Wisdom must be prominently and rationally cultivated.  Alternative states of consciousness and subconscious forms of intelligence should be freely considered.

Without these factors, you are essentially an organic :heretic regardless of your official affiliation.  Your religious life deviates from The Way and will require :prophetic correction — hopefully before your personal apocalypse or cultural irrelevance!

If we take this general set of regressive social pathologies seriously then what is the opposite? What should we expect religions to be like if they are healthy, strong and ready to flourish in the strange coming years?  If it is true that “by their fruits ye shall know them,” then what are the characteristics of this kind of good, ripe fruit?

Inherited or emergent religious activity must, of course, have a sense of robust integrity that does not merely succumb to new social fads.  There are many ways in which religion must hold its ground against the fickle voices of mass-mediated cultural waves.  Yet, at the same time, it cannot produce its own healthy function unless it is deeply adapted to the technological, cultural and ecological reality of its historical niche.  Any religious activity will tend to become fragmentary, regressive and merely nominal unless it continues to operate according to the ancient generative and adaptive principles that have always governed human religiousness.
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Transdisciplinary

One principle is that religion, whether traditional, emergent or superficially secular, must recognize itself as inherently transdisciplinary.  That means it must be proactive in inviting and blending many diverse classes of people and domains of social activity.  The most successful and stable religions, going forward, will likely be those that can integrate and :consecrate the greatest diversity of types of people and the broadest array of social disciplines — with special emphasis on the deep inclusion of science as well as the “spiritual” or “wise” methods of inner development.

What else is required in to produce a robust intersubjective capacity for sacralization?
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Reclamation of the Transcendent to include the Real

Healthy religions of all kinds must cultivate a new basic orientation to frame the co-production of sacredness.  We might call this principle strong transcendence with pre-eminent immanence. This includes both:

(a) making available the radical encounter with altered states, the “absolute,” and the epistemic humility of waking-state social personalities in the face of a constantly transforming universe that holds truths that endlessly exceed our current perspectives and capacities, and

(b) doing this in a way that evades any reactive hierarchical notion that we must only “ascend” to Spirit by foregoing the mortal, material, sexual, emotional, relational and biological domains.

The beautiful formulations of Axial Age religions often presented the transcendent principle as though it were fundamentally coupled with abstract, impersonal and disembodied dimensions of reality.  Yet this framing is challenged by ancient mystics, integrative philosophers and contemporary sciences.  Today and tomorrow, our :theophanic sentiments about the Divine must assert that it is real, available and located most directly in the particularity of what is alive and close-at-hand. This attitude which prioritizes the implicit transcendental principle must extend into our biospheric environments and into our specific cultural embedding.  It must work with local forms.
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The romantic impulse to escape our disenchanted society into the exotic iconography and terminology of distant places and times must be carefully critiqued.  And our historically horrifying impulse to “help” indigenous cultures by traumatically forcing their children into pseudo-religious schools must be rigorously challenged in our psyches and systems.  The generative function of religion does not first demand a shift into another culture.  It works from inside out.  It begins with the existing cultural forms and seeks, in their depths, an organic interconnectivity that can align them with others to access to the creative overflow of integrative Spirit

Sacralization does not jump levels.  It must be build up from the ground.  For example, unless we are meeting people, regardless of their cultural, racial or linguistic peculiarities, with an inward gesture of affirmative mutual recognition, then we lack any foundation upon which to co-produce our more elaborate cathedrals.  Unless it begins in your daily encounters, it does not begin at all.

Likewise, if we cannot teach each other to resonate with the mythic potency of our already existing everyday languages, rather than require we use foreign language that is supposedly more mystical, then we have not yet found the natural spring around which to build our well — and thus instead of religion we get a perverse dualism of disenchanted masses and seekers-for-the-exotic.

Religion must also valorize human beings through the sacralization of the :inexorable coupling of both sovereignty and communion.  Only solutions that amplify both of these conditions can be called sacred. Yet, by far, the greatest issue facing the human practice of sacredness is, as it anciently was, our relationship with Nature.  

To make holy the natural and to naturalize holiness is not only a high-priority ethical demand placed upon all religions in the age of :anthropogenic ecological instability but it is also a conscious reconnection with the primary elemental and :biospheric conditions around which human religious activity has been organized for the majority of its history. This should include a new intelligent spirit of jihad or crusade that places biodiversity and diverse human well-being at the core of mass social mobilizations.

Key religious areas of concern in the coming years, therefore, must be ecological education, immersive recreation in complex biological environments and leadership in the meta-social obligation to create vibrant culture by aligning the :technosphere with the biosphere.
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Diversity and Creativity

Let us quickly mention a few more facets of all viable contemporary religions:

• An appreciation for psychotherapy and subconscious intelligence, shadow work, awareness of projection, being trauma-informed and exploring :psychic plurality.
• The affirmation of multiple style of intelligence within human beings and an emphasis on their mutual cultivation and harmonization.
• A “Vedic” approach in which it is assumed that local cults, with their idiosyncratic terms, icons and rituals, are intrinsically part of a coherent, universal religious superstructure from which they derive validity and into which they upload emergent forms of sacred excitement and meaning.
• Valorization of antifragility, adaptivity and creative incorporation (as opposed to degenerative puritan fragility).
• An intelligent response to transhumanism, the ongoing encounter with nonhuman intelligences and the many bio-technological opportunities for humans to become other than human, including a strong theological response to AI.
• Support for experimental economics, the radical, necessary but unknown future transformations of the fundamentals of the economic systems that are currently constraining the shared sacred dimension of human flourishing.
• Lastly, there must be special attention paid to the cultivation of natural priests and priestesses who will wisely perform local interventions, undertake the reconsolidation of diverse, bottom-up religious potentials and constantly regenerate the basic principles of healthy, adaptive and authentically transcendent religion. This facet is key to the transformations of religion we are exploring here and deserves its own section.

These are hard and open questions.  And as we enter an epoch that will likely be characterized, for many people, by massive information mistrust, pervasive simulation and perhaps cognitive decline, we will have to co-ponder how religion deals with public paranoia and hysteria (in both their pro- and anti- establishment variants).  Overloaded citizens trapped in dehumanizing lifestyles and exposed to nearly traumatic levels of attention-hacking may present a :“walking wounded” population. To what degree must we reignite the ancient functions of superstition management, public mobilization and extra-governmental social safety nets that were :common features of religion during the premodern era?

You will need to help us.  Intelligent, collaborative processes of :collective sapience will be needed to figure out the direct roles that religion ought to play in various civilizational problems.

It is worse than useless, from a religious point of view, to promote people into positions of “religious authority” due to :heredity, :social prominence, profession of dogma, or the completion of certified training programs in :bureaucratic pseudo-universities.  The social replacement of individuals who possess innate and collaborative shamanic capacity is the most direct path to problematically conflating actual religious activity with a political, superstitious and maladaptive simulation of faithful community.

Such people participated in the shamanic networks that produced religiousness during the dominant pre-historical period of humanity.  They helped organize the creation of cities and writing and created the civilizing religions.  During periods of rampant culturopathy, they were often driven underground into esoteric, alchemical or tantric brotherhoods or else forced to live outside civilization as endangered “witches” in exile.  Under the reign of modernity there has been a significant decrease of active abuse and persecution of such people yet they remain unrecognized, ill-tutored and far from playing their crucial religionizing role for the civilization at large.

Authentic shamanistic capacity cannot be bought, taught or instantiated as a symbolic status.  It must be detected, cultivated, supported and promoted.  And the relevant skill set that must be individually and mutually unfolded among such people includes, very prominently, such things as the ability to remain dis-identified from narrative psychology in both the personal and cultural sense.  In order to be genuine religious workers, therefore, they must be able and encouraged to move freely into the ambiguous intensities that exist between and outside common verbal sensemaking. The reinforcement of conventional adherence to a symbolic narrative is often counterproductive to natural priests and likely to incentivize, instead, upcoming cognitive and emotional conformists and status-seekers rather than individuals who demonstrate the imaginal, somatic-affective and socio-ecological signs of incipient adepthood.

Who are these people?

Individuals included within this internally-diverse :neurodivergent cluster exhibit many signs.  No single attribute is essential but rather the presence of several of the primary indicators should be highlighted and peer-verified.  These signs may include; a strong attraction to embodied experiments in ritual production. Near-obsession with altered states, depth-unfoldment, subtle perception, spirit-invocation, :trans-linguistic consciousness, :trans-cultural religious practices, relative freedom or indifference from conventional social roles, heightened :sensitivity and :mimicry, capacity for :poetic attunement, ease with :paradox and :inversion, high frequency of :endogenous peak experiences, fascination with the “mechanics” of flow states and strong interpretive flexibility.We might tentatively call them esoteric according to an old tradition that divides human religious activity into three entangled categories.
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Exoteric, Mesoteric, & Esoteric ‍

The exoteric (”outer”) form of religion involves the general population of the village or nation.  Such people are typically busy and not highly self-motivated toward religious affairs.  They are served by a deeply meaningful and elegant spirit-of-community and by access to periodic rituals such as for holidays, weddings, deaths, maturational initiations, etc.  It is important that they share :colloquial terminology, symbols and aesthetic options for participation in events that confirm the existential worthiness of their lives and efforts.  Under the pressures of human suffering, including the desert of popular delusion, the fires of significant decision-making and the vagaries of inner complexification, they may also fall into moods of crisis or insight that require wise feedback from religious specialists.

Mesoteric (”middle”) religionists represent a smaller population of people who are highly interested in the aspirational ideas and wisdom-development practices associated with the saints, teachings and popular practices :enshrined in the memory of the community.

And the esoteric (”inner”) network consists of an even smaller affiliation between people who are instinctively driven toward :idiosyncratic engagement with the experiments and challenges that provoke organic religious intelligence.  Such people — in whom reside the primary responsibility for the ongoing regeneration of religion — might be described as a particular class of genetically-conserved neurodiversities exhibiting a set of common behavioral traits.  They are (at least more than average and as we have previously said) interested in altered states, ecological communion, the hidden meaning of sacred sayings, “subtle” energetic capacities, subconscious intelligence, communion with transpersonal phenomena, improvisational production of ritual, self-maturational risks, imaginal :praxis, occupying :liminal spaces, etc.  These characters, whom the provocative Swedish techno-philosopher :Alexander Bard has called shamanoids, are tasked with the ongoing reproduction, refinement and health of human religions.

All three of these broad (and to some degree permeable) categories must be brought into :convivial and productive alignment through mutual recognition and ethical service.  There are normative esoteric activities that seem incomprehensible, anxiety-producing or unworthy of energetic investment to the majority of the citizens while, conversely, there are seemingly ordinary “everyday” behaviors that might be overwhelming and intolerable to those who are well-positioned for the development of shamanic capacity.

It is unproductive and uncharitable for esoteric practitioners to think of the general population (whom they should be serving) as sleepers, sheeple, unworthy conformists, etc.  Likewise it is highly problematic if the common cultural ethos looks with derision upon the sacred minority because they are ambivalent about or overly provoked by conventional identities, narratives and tasks.

Despite the necessity for all categories to mutually flourish, the selection, cultivation and promotion of the “shamanic” priests and priestesses represents a unique and significant feature of healthy religionization both inside and outside of our culturally inherited traditions.
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Failures in Cultivating the Esoteric

‍Three prominent failure modes exist relative to these esoteric individuals and networks:
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It is worse than useless, from a religious point of view, to promote people into positions of “religious authority” due to

• They are socially replaced by pseudo-hierophantic religious officials whose “magic hat” status is dependent on spiritually trivial factors such as inheritance, wealth, intra-organizational politics, public loyalty statements or graduation from legally-accredited academies for religious bureaucrats.
• They fall into decadence, degenerative hyper-sensitivity and self-destruction through lack of recognition, peer support and elder training.  Or,
• Despite flourishing they cannot combine with others in an empowering way to exert any necessary inputs into cultural, financial and technological activities of the society.
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The task of these healed, authentic and mutually supportive :gnostic intermediaries within any cultural context is not to create religion but to cultivate it.  The task of religious agents, our metaphorical gardeners, is therefore not to get people to be religious but to increase the quality and mutual coordination of their pre-existing religiousness. This means that any flourishing religion must prioritize the recognition, resourcing, peer co-training and cultural promotion of “naturally religious” social agents in distinction to unsupported, pathological or merely official pseudo-religious figures.

Beyond Religion, the philosopher :William Irwin Thompson describes his evolutionary vision of humanity’s engagement with the sacred — proceeding “from shamanism to religion to post-religious spirituality.”  This is a common sentiment.  Yet it is also a limit that we must begin to push past by understanding the full scope of what religion has been and the role that it must still play in bringing people together around the quivering excitation of the sacred.

Canadian cognitive scientist :John Vervaeke has called for a “religion that is not a religion.”  His idea is to collectively restart the project of interpersonal wisdom-production and intersubjective soulmaking in ways that can be heard, appreciated and implemented by rational people who are not self-defined as religious.  That phrase is attractive to people who feel spiritual-but-not-religious but they must also learn to embrace their existential allies.  The religion that isn’t a religion can also be any religion old or new.

They are all subject to the same basic dynamics that determine whether they are really doing it, merely talking about, or even persisting in regressive dehumanizing habits under the guise of faith.  All religion is subject to the obvious fact that this activity must be done (and done well if religion is to have any power) in mutual adaptation to the world that is emerging — technologically, culturally and ecologically.

‍Authentic religion is a set of unfolding properties that occur when groups or communities are arranged properly. We could imagine a human population being akin to a fluid chemical solution in a laboratory.  It conducts electricity as long as the chemicals remain mixed and fairly evenly distributed.  If, after a while, the solution degrades and separates into several distinct substances then the ability to conduct energy breaks down.

To get it to work, someone needs to stir it.

This is the fundamental principle of religion.

If we do it well, then we recreate our meta-cultural capacity for meaningful and coordinated lives that are existentially satisfying and capable of mobilizing adaptively to :revalorize and restructure the system in which we are embedded.

If we do not do this effectively, authentically and in ways that are informed by fact, wisdom-development and health, then we suffer a meaning crisis — rampant neurosis, disenchantment and interpersonal emptiness combined with social stagnation in the face of our shared large-scale adaptive and moral challenges.

The historical sign of viable religionization is found in those cultural moments that we call :renaissances.  Today we deal with the mixed descendants of those successful events.  Some of these inheritors still struggle to undertake the prophetic task of soulful revitalization and social re-alignment.  Yet many more people today are resigned to the suspicious anti-religious crouch, or relegated to the merely nominal life of religious self-identification in organizations that function more like museums than regenerators of inclusive public sacredness or, even worse, sacrilegiously inflamed into perverse enemies of health and wisdom under the guise of a puritan return to dysfunctional, outdated modes of religiousness.

Yet real religion can and must occur today and tomorrow.  In fact it is constantly occurring.  To be genuine and enlivened participants in the empowerment of these always-present social tendencies, we must become more aware of the basic principles that take religion to the next level in their service to diverse humanity, ecology and divinity.  We must gain a more clear and actionable understanding of the differences between healthy, developmental, complex human enterprises and fragile, degenerative, unnatural enterprises — and have the courage to apply this to both old and new religion.

If we do not, together, take up this enticing challenge then religion will continue to appear in the world as unnecessary, disingenuous, manipulative and regressive — and that is very bad for a world that desperately needs wise, spirit-oriented self-organization that can imbue life with :apotheosis and adaptive responses to collective challenges.