Be open to spiritual experiences, but be careful in your openness

As a writer I’m always reaching for terminology that can capture various divisions within the general pattern of American Christianity’s decline: “liberal” versus “conservative” Catholics when I write about my own church; “heresy” or “orthodoxy” to describe tendencies within and around Christian belief; “secularism” and “paganism” to discuss modes of post-Christianity.

But the dissolution of the old order of American religion means that more and more religious lives are lived in-between worldviews, in experimental territory where it’s a mistake to expect coherence, theological consistency, a definite set of prior assumptions or beliefs.

In this column I want to defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation and then to warn about its dangers. But first let me give you three examples of the experimental style I have in mind, from the general to the specific.

Start with the broad youthful impulse toward what you might call magical thinking, ranging from the vogue for astrology to the TikTok craze for “manifesting” desired outcomes in your life. In certain ways, this is an extension of the self-help spiritualities that have been attached to American religion since forever, but right now the magical dimension is more explicit, the connection to old-time religion weak to nonexistent.

A second example is the increasing fascination with psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs, which takes secular and scientific forms but also has a strong spiritual dimension, with many participants who believe the drugs don’t just cause an experience within the mind but also open the “doors of perception,” in Aldous Huxley’s phrase, to realities that exist above and around us all the while.

This is clearly true of the emergent spiritual culture around DMT, an ingredient in the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca that’s become a trip of choice for so-called psychonauts — explorers of the spiritual territory that its ingestion seems to open up.

Now a third example, very specific: Recently, a statue appeared on a New York courthouse. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower.

The figure’s sculptor, Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander, has emphasized her work’s political significance. The golden woman wears a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar, and she’s meant to symbolize female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal.

But the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions. Sikander has devised a religious icon that lacks a settled religious meaning, that’s deliberately open to infusions from the viewer, that summons spiritual energy in a nonspecific way.

For the stringent materialist, everything I’ve just described is reasonable as long as it’s understood to be playacting, experience hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.

However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I’m describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness.

Yes, plenty of New Age and “woo-woo” practices don’t make any sense or lead only unto pyramid schemes; there are traps for the credulous all over. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age (and even sometimes to professional skeptics), makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe’s mysteries — if you’re starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.