Questioning Conspirituality

I’ve gotta be honest, I’m feeling a little QAnon queasy lately. It might have something to do with the fact that my mental breakdown eleven years ago was directly precipitated by exposure to conspiracy theories that were not very different from the kind we see infecting spiritual culture today.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I lost my sanity after becoming involved with an online cult that used sophisticated brainwashing techniques to prey on vulnerable people with weak ego structures. Well, I’m afraid movements like QAnon are employing similar tactics and this partly accounts for the explosion of interest in conspirituality (where conspiracy theories meet spirituality) since the pandemic began.

QAnon tore through some New Age communities like wildfire, and I’ve seen far too little resistance. Some of my own friends sank their teeth into some of these shaggy dog stories and came out conspiritually converted. Part of the problem is that modern spiritual folk have spent so much time dissolving their egos and decoupling from the mainstream, they’ve become more vulnerable to PSYOP manipulation by extremist activists.

The storming of the Capitol on January 6th made it more clear to me how broken our information ecology really is, not to mention our psycho-social-spiritual fabric itself, and how this will have increasingly bizarre and at times disastrous real-world consequences. Though the events of that day could have been a lot worse, the images pressed themselves on our psyches in a primal way, like few others we’ve seen, and sent a clear message that “business as usual” no longer exists in the way it did a year ago or even a month ago.

Perhaps no image was more striking than the photo of the “QAnon Shaman” flexing on the dais of the Senate Chamber. It felt as though someone had opened a stargate and let something into our reality that normally isn’t supposed to be there. Joe Rogan shared it on Instagram with the caption, “Dear aliens, now would be a good time,” nailing the exact feeling I had. It was also fitting when you consider that this self-proclaimed shaman, Jake Angeli, genuinely believed he was exposing the presence of reptilian overlords who hover over Washington politicians, claiming he could sense them with his extrasensory abilities.

Investigating the QAnon Shaman’s claims or discussing the reality of aliens is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice to say I think he’s deluded in a major way and doing an injustice to the office of shamanism. The true shaman is able to balance ecstatic and intuitive states of consciousness with discernment and reason. He or she does not get swept up in the latest all-encompassing conspiracy theories about evil cabals (i.e. “There’s someone behind the scenes pulling the strings and that explains everything”) but instead is continuously aware of the daimonic, trickster nature of reality.

He or she understands that many popular conspiracy theories are “pathological expressions of a necessary developmental stage,” as Jamie Wheal recently put it. In other words, they can serve as on-boarding ramps toward higher consciousness, but they are also dangerous as they are easy to get lost in, similar to “schizophrenia” and other extreme states of consciousness. When I wrote about conspiracy theories in April, I said the world was “slipping into a kind of ‘schizophrenic’ break of its own.” That statement continues to feels accurate, which is both disturbing and invigorating.

It makes me incredibly sad that Jake Angeli, such a perceptive and charismatic young man, is now in prison after being radicalized by an online cult. In many ways, I see myself in him, and recognize that I could have easily ended up in a similar situation if I hadn’t gotten a hold of myself. As a sacredphrenic person, I also long to bring the shamanic into the mainstream, and can think of few other instances that have even caused the subject to be broached by news anchors. The very fact that such a symbolic photo was taken tells me that shamanism is rising within the collective unconscious.

It also tells me we’re going to need to continue sharpening our discernment so we can skillfully navigate this transition into a new era that feels “increasingly like a waking dream — or, if we haven’t done the inner work needed to handle this intensification of psychic energies, like a turbulent nightmare,” as Daniel Pinchbeck wrote about the strange times we find ourselves living in. Part of that work must involve questioning conspirituality while simultaneously recognizing that there are genuine conspiracies that deserve our attention, and not getting lost in the spaces in between.