The other night, I let my husband use my laptop and he came across a PDF I’d left open entitled “The Cassiopaea Experiment Transcripts 1994.” He gave me a look that I mistook for interest, so I casually explained that the Cassiopaeans were a group of sixth-density multidimensional beings channeled by a woman named Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who warned of extraterrestrials meddling in historical events and the coming quantum shift in human consciousness. He’s known me long enough to watch these cycles play out: the way I deep dive into some spiritual phenomenon that I briefly adopt as my entire reality, only to discard it to chase the next cosmic carrot. Aside from that time I wheeled out a white board to analyze our life choices based on the principles of Reality Transurfing, or that phase where I attempted astral projection using an at-home EEG headset, he never seems to mind my spiritual sojourns. I’ve reassured him that my beliefs are defined more by a roving, indiscriminate curiosity than a devotion to any one specific ideology, and anyway, my short attention span and aversion to group activities keep me from becoming fully indoctrinated into any cults or pyramid schemes. 

The term “spiritual” is one of those ethereal, catchall words that gets thrown around, like “wellness,” “mindfulness,” and “consciousness.” It’s also commonly used to describe a more fluid and personal connection to the divine in defiance of organized religion—as in the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” Calling yourself spiritual is a fairly benign claim to make in L.A., where I live, and where astrology and plant medicine are cultural norms and the word “vibes” has been co-opted by corporate marketing to sell everything from prebiotic soda to baby diapers. But venture too far out there and you get cast as delusional, anti-science, a sucker for charlatans and snake oil. You risk getting lumped in with some of the most insufferable people to walk the earth: the biohacking psychonaut bro, the Erewhon smoothie suckling manifestation girl, the Starseed TikToker, the self-diagnosed “empath,” or anyone on any kind of journey, e.g. the sort of spiritual narcissist that historian and social critic, Christopher Lasch warned about in the seventies: a person who appropriates God as a “glorified lifestyle concierge” or a “security blanket” to placate their existential dread and center themselves in the cosmos. For these and other reasons, I’ve mostly kept my spiritual leanings private (unless someone expresses interest, in which case I become a manic child, breathlessly hurling my recent findings at them).

Sometimes I envy diehard adherents of an established belief system with clean borders and shared rituals, be it a major religion or a practice like Transcendental Meditation. What am I supposed to do with all these disparate, and sometimes contradictory beliefs I’ve accumulated over the years? Nonduality! But also reincarnation. Simulation theory! But also panpsychism. Aliens! But also angels. Manifest! But also surrender. I sense an underlying thread connecting all of it, but it falls apart when I try to articulate it. It’s the same feeling I get when I try to explain my love for my child. It’s less word-based and more like a high pitched animal sound. Anyone fresh off a hero’s dose of mushrooms can tell you that language is too reductive and clunky to translate the ineffable; to speak of it is to already degrade its essence. Language is what turns an otherworldly dream into a boring story, and a timeless, infinite energy field into a Sky Daddy. And yet we try anyway, all the time.

Looking back, it was my Catholic upbringing that planted the seeds of my future polyamorous approach to spirituality. I just could not get on board with the whole burning in Hell for all eternity thing, especially for such minor infractions as lying to my parents or being mean to my siblings (unless I got on my knees and whispered my confessions through a partition to an adult man in a robe). I wanted to believe in something bigger than myself, but I had a hard time thinking that thing was a wrathful, authoritative father figure who seemed needy for validation and weirdly preoccupied with adolescent sexual urges. So many of my questions went unanswered, like: what happens to the babies who die before they’re baptized? Why does a loving God allow suffering? Why pray to a saint when you can just pray to God directly? Why did God let Satan torture Job? Why was forbidden fruit even in the garden if eating it would have such permanent and catastrophic consequences for all of humanity? If God is all-powerful, couldn’t he just let us into heaven without making his only son die? The adults in my life would just get angry with me or mumble something about having faith. Faith: the ultimate conversational dead-end.

This left me with a God-shaped hole I was eager to fill with spiritual knowledge of all kinds—the more occult and taboo, the better. After college, I worked for nonprofits and toured with bands, where I killed time at used bookstores in search of sacred texts and maybe even some love spells to try “as a joke.” I had no guides, or algorithms, I just went off the strangest book covers I could find. I got halfway through Dianetics before someone told me what Scientology was. This was how my self-taught spiritual education began: by feeling around in the dark and discovering books by Aldous Huxley and Henry Miller, spiritual teachers like Ram Dass and Krishnamurti, psychonauts like Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson.

This was child’s play compared to what I’d later find online. It’s not that the internet replaced spiritual books for me (please don’t make me show you my embarrassing shelf of New Age self-help books), but it turbocharged my seeking and added a whole new dimension to it. The sheer abundance of information, teachings, and lore to parse through has expanded my knowledge base. The screen functions as a great equalizer, making nothing and everything sacred.

Now I can skim a PDF of The Tibetan Book of the Dead while watching videos of a Youtube astrologer from Montreal named Patrizia, and in another tab, consult the ichingonline.net by flipping digital coins. This practice of blending elements from various spiritual traditions, syncretism, is not new. It’s found in everything from Gnosticism, Theosophy, Voudou, Sikhism, and the Bahá’í Faith. All belief systems have been remixed, to some degree, it’s just that the internet’s endless scroll is fertile ground for this kind of hybrid spirituality to evolve. In the book American Cosmic, D. W. Pasulka argues that the internet has become the modern medium for metaphysical experience and that belief is no longer top-down (from priests or ancient texts), but networked, fragmented, and experiential—mirroring how the internet itself functions. She sees it as a kind of digital pilgrimage site where people seek contact, meaning, and connection with something beyond.

Keeping one foot in this online realm of spiritual seeking provides a counterweight to the daily obligations of motherhood that are so mired in the physical world: wiping endless crud off my son’s face, taking out the trash, folding laundry, repeat ad infinitum. I half-hoped that having a baby would finally satiate my spiritual appetite, but it only made it deeper, more mysterious. If we really are spiritual beings having a human experience, becoming a mother has made everything feel a little too human. My life no longer allows for eight hour mind-obliterating psychedelic odysseys, so, in lieu of direct contact, I now microdose the divine by reading and listening to second-hand experiencer accounts online and in books. It’s not exactly like being fully burned up in God’s brilliant light, but it’s a contact high.

I can sense a paradigm shift is afoot that makes me feel less alone in my spiritual exploration. Something is happening, and it’s been building for the last few years. Many tendrils of spirituality are now gaining legitimacy, thanks to a confluence of scientific breakthroughs, widespread cultural acceptance, and mounting global existential crises. In 2024, a Pew study found that 81 percent of Americans believe in something beyond the material world. Interest in UFO/UAPs has surged, with increasing reports, whistleblower testimonies, and government disclosures, including congressional hearings and declassified programs like AATIP. Meanwhile, advances in quantum physics and neuroscience are beginning to validate ancient spiritual concepts, particularly about consciousness and the nature of reality. In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for research on quantum entanglement, proving that the universe is not “locally real,” and in 2024, Google’s quantum AI team claimed to have evidence of parallel universes. Similarly, the psychedelic renaissance is reshaping our understanding of consciousness and mental health, leading to policy changes and government-funded studies.

All these discoveries are challenging the long-standing paradigm of Newtonian mechanics and scientific materialism—the belief that the universe operates solely through physical matter and its interactions. At the same time, faith in traditional institutions is eroding due to systemic inequality, climate catastrophe, and social movements exposing abuse and corruption. The deification of Trump as a so-called “establishment outsider” can be seen as an inverse of the same impulse. People are searching for answers outside and beyond consensus reality. When the center cannot hold, we move closer to the edge.

This threshold between the old and new world is marked by unpredictability, chaos, and destruction, or as Terence McKenna, who predicted the “high strangeness” of our times, put it, “I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.” In these weird times, it makes sense to want to grasp onto something, even the promise of a great awakening of human consciousness. Maybe there is no shift, or there are just endless shifts, undulating like waves in the ocean. When faced with the big unanswered questions—about the future, or God or what happens when we die—I’m comforted by a quote from Chögyam Trungpa who said, “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.”

My toddler doesn’t know about the Cassiopaeans. He doesn’t know we’re in free fall. He moves through the world, truly delighted by every leaf and rock and bug. It takes us forever to get anywhere and most of the time it’s really boring. But sometimes he will shock me out of my phone-addled fugue state with the discovery of a flower and I will meet him there in a state of shared reverence and wonder. Then he will rip the flower to shreds, laughing maniacally, and that, too, will be holy.