This is the text of a talk I gave at Medicine festival in August 2022, summarising research I and others have done in the last three years on conspiracy thinking in New Age spirituality.
I’m going to talk about ‘conspirituality’ — the overlap between new age spirituality and conspiracy thinking, especially during the pandemic
Read MoreOn March 17 2020, a few days after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a pandemic and states had enforced lockdowns on their citizens, Oprah Winfrey’s name trended on Twitter.
Read MoreAbove is an interview I did with Stephen Dinan, the CEO of the Shift Network, which is the biggest platform of online wisdom courses, with around three million customers.
Read MoreThere’s not much I can add to all that will be written about Wednesday’s day of infamy, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill, but I can perhaps shed light on one aspect of it — the role of “conspirituality” in fomenting the riot and in shaping the man who will go down as its poster boy: Jake Angeli, the “QAnon shaman.”
Read MoreI want to discuss the difficult question: to what extent can one cleanly distinguish a ‘spiritual emergency’ from other psychotic experiences.
‘Spiritual emergency’ is a term introduced by two transpersonal psychologists — Stanislav and Christina Grof — in 1989, to describe a disturbing spiritual experience which has some aspects of psychosis, but which should not be treated as ordinary mental illness. Instead, insist the Grofs, a ‘spiritual emergency’, if properly handled, can ‘have tremendous evolutionary and healing potential’.
Read MoreSometimes people of a cynical perspective say to me ‘you should start a cult’. Anything spiritual automatically sounds culty to them. In fact, I think it would be quite easy to start a cult and find some followers. You just need to appear totally certain in your ideas, and at least some lost souls will happily hand over their minds. But that’s a pretty boring game to play.
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