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.

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.

When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, movements like Theosophy offered a kind of third way, a path toward understanding the world between science and religion. Theosophy was in conversation with both realms, using tools like magical

It is often said that this where we are now is a moment of spiritual revival. The mainstreaming of tools like astrology and tarot, the taking up of the symbol of the witch as an acceptable feminine archetype, workplaces hiring “spiritual consultants” to imbue their offices with meaning and ritual, the common use of language around “energy” and “the