New Age Spirituality: What to Know and How it Links to Conspiracy Theory with Jules Evans
Our guest this week, Jules Evans, researcher, philosopher, and the person that inspired me to dive into this whole realm of mixing spirituality with conspiracy, joined me for a conversation to talk all things socratic and ecstatic, conspirituality, and creating boundaries in your own spirituality. Jules tells us how a freak skiing accident helped him heal from a life of misadventure with drugs, and led him all the way back to the Stoics of Ancient Greece and the work that he does. We chat about the concept of conspirituality and being able to enjoy spirituality without falling into these more darker areas.
Who is Jules Evans?
Jules is an honorary research fellow at the Center for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. He researches the history of ideas and how they can help us flourish today. His research has explored everything from the revival of stoicism and modern life to the cultural history of ecstatic experiences. He's a co-organizer of the London Philosophy Club, the largest philosophy club in the UK. And he gives talks and workshops on practical philosophy around the world. Some of his books that he has written are Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations* and The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher’s Search for Ecstatic Experience.* He’s also the person that inspired me to dive into this whole realm of mixing spirituality with conspiracy. Why does that happen? What's the nuances behind it?
Fully Living Out the Idea
Jules wanted to be a writer since he was in his teenage years, initially focused in fiction, but quickly realizing his passion lied in nonfiction. He drew inspiration from “60s literary nonfiction writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson. So I call myself a Gonzo philosopher. Hunter Thompson called himself a Gonzo journalist, which meant he didn't just write about like Nixon or you know, sporting events, he put himself into the story through himself, so you can say, I kind of tried to do that with ideas, not just write about them, but try them out, live them see what they're like to actually follow.” He also draws from his passion to make people’s live’s better in his writing and learning, he writes about “spirituality, religion, philosophy. That's, I guess that's what motivates me. I've had experiences of mental health problems in my late teens and early twenties. And that very much shaped my kind of vocation, I realized how the mind could be both a heaven and a hell. I realized how unpleasant it is to experience like, mental ill health and how liberating it is when you work out how to kind of heal that. So that that kind of, you know, started me on this path.”
Two things made that switch to feeling better mentally for Jules. The first was a near death experience during his twenties. He fell off a cliff during a skiing accident and experienced that “classic cheesy white light, and I just felt immersed in a white light and like, filled with love.” He had been struggling with post traumatic stress for years but during the near death experience, he had a “deep sense that I was okay. And that there was something in us that can't be broken or damaged or taken away or lost. And I also had a sense that what had been causing my suffering for all this all these years was my beliefs. Not my you know, broken neuro chemistry, but my own thinking, which I could change. So that was incredibly liberating. Like realizing I'm doing this to myself, and I don't have to do that. I can change my thoughts.” The second thing goes back to ancient Greek philosophy, from a stoic philosopher named Epictetus, and is the idea that “what causes people suffering is not events, but their opinion about events. So it's our own opinions, our own beliefs, our own internal quotation that can make situations bearable, unbearable. So those two things showed me the incredible power of beliefs, opinions and ideas, that they literally are the building blocks of our reality. But usually we're unconscious and unaware of the beliefs and opinions we hold. And that's where we get stuck in kind of in prisons.”
Stoicism was essential for Jules in staying grounded, he even wrote his first book about stoicism. He threw himself fully into being a stoic, getting a tattoo on his arm, helping to “revive stoicism, I organized the first gathering of stoics for 2000 years, you know, there's now like a stoic on every year. So I was part of that. And then what happens sometimes is you just kind of grow out of philosophy a little bit. So I still love stoicism. But I realized it wasn't enough, it was a bit too individualistic, and a bit too rationalistic for me.” Then, he became interested in the ecstatic experience and began his second book about that how people can be “healed by ecstatic experiences. I was aware that that near death experience I'd had was not me reasoning something out, it was something that happened to me, you know, and a powerful ecstatic experience that took me out of my normal self and connected me to something I don't fully understand.”
He began exploring Christianity as part of his ecstatic experience research, even converting publicly before realizing after “a year and a half, I still can't believe this. And so that was really, that was an awkward kind of moment. So yeah, I try not to be too much of a tourist, you know, just like bouncing in, bouncing out, I'm properly, you know, I'm seriously trying to kind of improve my life and improve myself, rather than just like, you know, drifting down the spiritual buffet and trying a bit of this and trying a bit of that, you know.”
The Concept of Conspirituality
According to Jules, the term conspirituality was coined by two anthropologists a decade ago and is “the overlap between spirituality like New Age, spirituality, and conspiracy thinking. So it's common spirituality. So they noticed a decade ago, in some aspects of New Age culture, you had someone like David Ike, who is a well known conspiracy theorist, he was a sports presenter on the BBC. And one day he announced that he was Jesus or the Messiah. He announced this on a chat show poor guy, cuz he was having some kind of spiritual emergency. And the whole nation laughed at him, which must be very traumatic for him. He then went away and became a complete conspiracy theorist.”
He was just an early example of ecstatic thinking leading to paranoia. Jules only discovered this in April of last year, “when I saw in my kind of spiritual networks, this was in the first month of lockdown. People were sharing completely far out conspiracy theories, not just people, but like leaders in leading influences in my networks in kind of spiritual networks, which is like kind of plant medicine, energy healing, yoga, all that stuff. And they were sharing documentaries about pizza gate and Q anon conspiracies. They were sharing interviews with David.” He started thinking more and more about why people in the “spirituality” culture can be “prone to conspiracy thinking. What what drives that overlap? I think that there are various reasons. I mean, you could talk about psychological reasons, economic reasons, and cultural reasons. So people who are drawn to spirituality tend to be very independent thinking and very distrustful of like official sources, like official religions, official news official, all of that, that makes them prone to, you know, much more drawn to things like alternative news, alternative medicine, alternative theories of reality.”
There’s a personality trait that can be called “schizotypy, which sounds bad, but it's not necessarily, it means capacity for unusual thinking, the capacity for altered states of consciousness, the capacity for like, mythical thinking, the capacity to see unusual connections and patterns, all of that can make you an extremely creative person, an original thinker. But it can also make you prone to see on hyperdrive, to see all kinds of everything is connected.” So it’s clear how that can make a person more prone to a conspiracy theory, “in which everything is part of one grand plan. So you could think of, you know, a conspiracy theory, in a way is like, it's like a bad trip, where, you know, it's all connected, it's all one. But it's, it's all connected into an evil plot.”
Mental Hygiene
Jules recommends practicing “mental hygiene.” Our intuition is powerful but definitely not “infallible. So just because you really feel something, doesn't mean it's definitely true. So, yes, you can get you there are such things as like, spiritual experiences, revelations, and so on. But we've always got to try and test them out as well, with kind of critical thinking, if it really flies in the face of critical thinking, then, you know, it's, it's, it can lead us astray.” It’s important to actually looked about where the errors in your thinking can be found, what are the flaws? Simply trying to defend and stand by your thinking and beliefs all the time does not “you to grow instead, you know, occasionally look for what are the probable flaws in my thinking, What's holding me back. Because we'll all have just, you know, don't cling to your beliefs, hold them a bit lightly, and be prepared to let them go, if new evidence kind of comes in. So I think community can can really help us I think when we're isolated, that can make us go down kind of, you know, fear, fear and panic and stuff. So trying to find just a healthy community. That that can help us too.”
He also says it’s important to balance reason and the aspects of life that are “somewhat beyond reason. But that doesn't mean letting reason go, like reasons got to be kind of a companion on this journey. And be very suspicious of simplistic answers.” It isn’t necessarily a negative thing to be a little skeptical of people who are telling you things like a “great awakening” is coming any day now where “evil is going to be completely purged. And love is going to completely thrive, they're probably trying to sell you something, you know, it's like, these are like, fraud schemes. They're like pyramid schemes.” It’s important to balance your skepticism and your beliefs, explore different ideas without falling prey to the conspiracies.
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Affirmation
I radiate with kindness no matter where I am or who I’m with. The energy around me rises with my presence.
Links From the Show
Learn more about Jules’ work at philosophyforlife.org.
Course: The History of Ideas
Book: Philosophy For Life And Other Dangerous Situations* by Jules Evans
Book: The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience* by Jules Evans
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