the neurosis of modern religion and how we must return to spiritual practices which allow us to integrate the absurd

i believe that the people of the world are desperate for spirituality, and they will use any hollow ritual, questionable history or outright collective delusion in order to make them feel like they have some grip on what the spiritual entails. all the while, they have absolutely no clue, and while they think their alter is built towards, allah, buddha, or yeshua, their actions reveal that they truly worship a more sinister market deity of neoliberal capitalism. people will say ‘in jesus name’ or ‘bismillah’ right before they engage in the most demonic, disconnected, and inhumane partaking you can imagine—these vain proclamations of faith appear phony to me. what i see is the most immoral and hostile people enforcing their version of morality, not for goodness sake, but for far more sinister reasons.

in a paper titled ‘ritual and its consequences: an essay on sincerity’, by seligman et. al (2008), the authors discuss how the true function of ritual is to locate social boundaries and dissolve them. rituals are a way to integrate the margins into the center and move the collective toward a future. in our current age, religious ritual is nothing more than a hollow performance to signal belonging into the center—it does nothing to confront the margins and it does nothing to change the social body in order to integrate the lessons learned with its confrontations with the absurd. 

rituals cannot remain stagnant. deities and conceptualizations of the ‘divine’ must metamorph—any kind of platonic worldview feels naive. we cannot expect to follow old ritual traditions and connect to spirituality—spirituality demands we confront newness. like herbert anderson says in mighty stories, dangerous rituals: weaving together the human and the divine, rituals can be invented and are always in the process of recreation. 

i believe the true function of the ritual is to firstly, confront the absurd, and then integrate it. modern day religion doesn’t do this. it denies your own intuitions, villainizes your humanity, and gaslights you into obedience. modern day religion is manipulative—all its many heads only gained prominence because of conquest and domination, not because appeal to reason. europe,  for instance is not predominantly christian by choice, but because decades long struggles to erase and eradicate pagan populations and practices. to assume popularity implies truth is devious, and in order to come back to grips with our senses, we have to be skeptical of any advance made in the name of these cancerous religions. 

for most people, religion is a way to cope with the absurdity of life, it is a way to adopt a simplified worldview so that one does not have to confront the bizarre strangeness of existing. if our religions were working, they would bring out our change and instead they only produce our stasis. put simply, religion gives you permission to stop thinking—and this promise is very tempting in an age of information overload. people, in my opinion, use mass organized religion to tether themselves into a world narrative that is absolute and undeniable so they can feel safe from what they don’t know, or what they don’t care to find out about. religion infantilizes the individual, gives them group validation in their delusion, and spiritually deprives them of a true connection to the beyond. but that’s not the point of spirituality or the ritual. spirituality isn’t a way to make sense of the absurdity, or to wrap the world in a conceptualization, but to come to terms with the idea that the world is always in a process of change, and it can never fall under a single model. true spirituality honors the infinite mystery, not a flimsy conception of ‘the truth’.

my psychedelic experiences have been THE most spiritual and profound experiences in my life, yet there is not a single mention anywhere in the popular religions of the phenomena—and usually only condemnation by clerics. after my first psychedelic experience, i just was stricken by how an experience with such a tremendously spiritual tone could be neglected by world religions. the only place i feel the psychedelic experience integrated is in folk and pagan traditions, so if anything these are the only systems that can be relevant. the people who honored psychedelic experience were the people who were repressed and silenced, and we’re left picking up from square one trying to make sense of it all. 

none of these popular religions can hold me or the absurdity of life—and so i keep wandering, not for a system or a model, but for new ways to connect with spirit. i realize how each one of these religions claims peace, but has unjustifiably spilled blood on their hands. the most spiritual thing for me to do here is to rebel, and make my way into the margin, to confront the absurd by myself. i will not rely on clerics, imams, and lamas to frame the absurd for me, i want to be exposed to its rawness. this, to me, is true baptism, this is the true samadhi. spirituality cannot be found until we confront our fear of the absurd—the goddess will not meet us while we lie on the floor, hunched in fetal position, frozen in stasis.

we can only find spirituality if we can cultivate the courage to journey beyond and lose ourself. the world is more absurd than any religion can conceptualize, and none of their messengers got it all right. we each have direct access to insights that the religious authorities claim to gatekeep, but have no proximity to. it’s up to us to rework ritual to find our way back to spirituality, because at this point true collective spiritual awakening is the only thing that has the capacity to save us from the impending natural bedlam we can feel closing in on us.