The Spirituality Returning Us to Earth
A Global Celebratory Movement Emerges from the Corpse of Dogmatic Religiosity
The Gypset. Neo-hippies. The Vibe Tribe. Whatever you call them, they are gathering across the world: Tulum, Ubud, Puna, Crestone, Amherst, Ashville, Goa, Cortez, Orcas Island. They are building eco-villages in Portugal, Costa Rica, Nicaragua. They are building pagan ‘temples’ in the Hudson Valley, and hosting fire circles in Minnesota and Maine. They are of mixed race, mixed nationalities, mixed age. Influenced by decades-long movements of self-optimization, collective healing, yoga, meditation, ecstatic dance and psychedelic therapy; the modern inheritors of the Chatauqua movement, transcendentalism, the Summer of Love, Burning Man and Festival culture…yet they are completely unique in their current (and growing) incarnation.
Enabled by easy travel between these global hotspots, and the accelerating and influence and transmission of digital social networks, the ideas and norms of this movement are transmitting rapidly around the earth, allowing the emergence of a new sort spirituality, with a set of transglobal syncretic myths, stories and rituals. I’ve been naming the whole phenomenon New Gaians (for now, anyway).
New Gaians have been birthed in a uniquely divisive age, with people facing eco-catastrophe, housing costs outpacing incomes, public sphere war spending outpacing love spending, and in many places, little collective support for life-affirming policies such as healthcare and education. Why, many rhetorically ask themselves, should we play a no-win game of scraping by, or even with financial abundance, in deep stress, sequestered from family, on the teat of consumerism? Facing ecological disaster, and the deep wounds of imperialism and capitalism, this emergent spirituality brings meaning and purpose in what often seems to be a mad world.
This new spirituality is a response to these conditions, and it’s also a response to the failings of most religion to meet those conditions. And of course, to the many decades of clergy sexual abuse and religious psychological abuse have been increasingly exposed. There’s even a rapidly growing global “religious recovery” movement, have you been tracking that?
And the New Gaians are growing, in part because the practices work: the norms and rituals meets human the neurobiological needs for connection, transcendence, ritual, meaning and organization, with none of the top-down dogma and control- and they address many of the existential, grief-inducing challenges of our time, including a restoration of community, touch, movement- and a restoration of humans to our rightful place in nature and the inclusion and honoring of the sacred feminine.
Two of the initial responses to the gap left by religion were moral atheism and the New Age movement.
Non-religious morality, of the “I don’t need an ancient book to not be an asshole” mentality, as proposed by Christopher Hitchens to Dan Dennett to Sam Harris said that we could have transcendent experiences without a god in the sky. It would be easy to suggest that a non-spiritual response to the world would be sufficient, with activism inside the given structures, but it isn’t enough. People long to share that embodied feeling-tone of the world as sacred, which is in and of itself a cure for deep separation. To recognize something greater than the I, the unified field, the web that we rest in. In the absence of religion, where in the civil culture do people turn for the sense of oneness and innate connection to the whole….to Sports? Nature? Entertainment? The cult of money and stuff?
For a long time, the now 60 year old new age movement was belittled and dismissed as foolishness. Religious, cultural and intellectual snobbery overlooked the essence of the thing: religions no longer provided answers (and for many they never did). So people began to invent, summon, syncretize and invoke things that DID work, based on their personal experience. At this point in the narrative of the “new age”, or new agers or hippies, we see past its comedic parody potential, and pay attention to its instincts and intelligence.
There’s no split between the material and the spiritual. We need this wonder, awe, magic, mystery- to see the world as alive and ensouled. We see that there’s something in the middle: the descending and immanent divinity in all things.
And this is the heart of the New Gaians practices and thinking: we are invited to a celebratory spirituality that returns us to earth. That brings us from the cave to the village. From the mind to the body. It’s the quantum field, the invisible, the unified consciousness, light and vibration. AND it is the rock and tree and wind and fire and all of the visible world- it is in and through all things.
Yes, I see it’s ancient roots in Siddhanta, in Indigenous traditions, in the through line of all the earth based spirituality hidden in plain view in mainstream religion, but it feels very different.
I have been lucky to transit the world and visit many of these places first hand, and now I can find these practices in rural German towns and in villages in India and in China and in Japan. Something is happening, it’s impactful for the planet, and for me a deep sign of hope and sanity. Our gentler belonging to the earth and each other is upon us.
I’ll offer more on New Gaian practices and beliefs in an upcoming post. In the meantime, may you experience the world as utterly alive, magical and connected- dance, and sing, and serve and celebrate with other open hearted beings.
To eros over thanatos, and love over fear.
XOXO, Christine
