Modern spirituality

I’m curious about religion for many of the same reasons I’m curious about open source. They’re organizational systems that bind people tightly together, and whose norms, fascinatingly, didn’t derive from any one place, but rather from a shared consensus iterated upon by each passing generation.

Of course this is what museum culture does: it, depending on your point of view, loots historical artifacts from a context in which they are useful and meaningful in order to turn them into commodities, or it protects and preserves the works while making them accessible to curious citizens of the world. Your own perspective on this might switch,

I have my own version of spiritual practice; I’m just not used to acknowledging it to others. But I think it gets expressed through the “why” of the work I do every day, where I’m moved to amplify creative potential in the world, and where I’m in awe of all the strange, ineffable qualities that make us human.

The witch has turned from being a figure of alienation and marginalization to one of aspiration. No longer does the witch manage the divide between the material and the divine, acting as an intermediary. She’s just another identity that requires only declaration and no real action, like feminist , like creative . The witch without knowledge is just

Why is faith so much more visible in open source, then? My theory: faith and open source both place high value on community and a sense of public service. Organized religion is the original distributed community, and it’s lasted thousands of years.

Higgie at one point attends a yoga class, and the instructor “plays a Tibetan singing bowl and tells us quietly that the world needs to soften.” She makes no effort to make the connection between yoga (a Hindu-related spiritual discipline) and a Tibetan singing bowl (a modern invention with roots neither in Tibet nor in shamanism as often claimed).