Contemplating Conspiracy — Conspirituality
‘As a kid I always wondered how a few islands which you can hardly see on the globe could have an Empire that spanned the world. Now the reason is obvious. It was not the Great British Empire at all. It was the Empire of the Babylonian Brotherhood.’
David Icke, The Biggest Secret
‘When we express the emotion of love we reconnect with our multidimensional self and our potential becomes infinite because we become infinite. We reconnect with the ocean, with “God”.’
Also David Icke, The Biggest Secret
It is commonly observed that interest in conspiracy theory, and interest in spirituality, have a good degree of overlap. The term conspirituality arose some years ago to describe this. The first time I heard it used it was in a positive sense, reflecting an awakening to both spiritual and temporal issues. In more recent times I have witnessed it transition into a pejorative; employed by spiritual people wanting to distance themselves from those they may share a yoga mat with, but whose conspiratorial views they find abhorrent.
2020 made this division within spiritual communities impossible to ignore any longer. If Covid 19 wasn’t bad enough, we also had QAnon and the U.S. election to contend with. Polite disengagement would no longer suffice — battle lines had to be drawn!
In many ways I am a child of conspirituality, becoming interested in both areas at almost exactly the same time. In fact David Icke’s book, The Biggest Secret, played a substantial role in my introduction, with the two quotes above sticking in my mind now twenty years later. Perhaps then through reflection on my own experience I can shed some light on a small segment of this issue.
Having been involved in spiritual communities, I’ve observed people make the understandable assumption that others present would broadly share their political views. That certain positions are obviously true and would be adopted by all rational, compassionate and loving people. These tend to be people on the ‘Green-Left’. They support a higher minimum wage, profess deep concern about climate change and would never think to question the principle of socialised medicine. They believe that, whilst governments do act nefariously, most conspiracy theories are fantasy. The Bush regime, for example, may have capitalised on 9/11, but were in no way involved in bringing it about.
I have further observed it can be a shock to such people when they find their views are not ubiquitous. They seem like such obvious consequences of a spiritual position, and yet here they are, sitting at the lunch table with people who voted Brexit, think Clinton was worse than Trump and are talking about bombs in the World Trade Centre. What on Earth is going on!?
I suspect we are seeing people with shared interests, but very different ways of conceptualising the world. Since interests are visible, but the methodology of our thinking is not, we may tend to assume an excess of similarity with those involved in our ideological groups. I can certainly observe how my own thinking process has shaped a certain worldview, both spiritual and temporal.
When I initially became interested in spirituality I read broadly, wanting to gain a sense of the entire landscape. As years went by I found myself naturally gravitating in certain directions. I was drawn to the simplicity of self-inquiry practice, the continuous dwelling upon variations of the foundational question: who am I? This practice could be arduous, requiring consistent penetrating attention and an ability to be comfortable with not finding easy or concrete answers. You cannot palm yourself off with glib platitudes about being one consciousness, nice as that might sound; rather we can just look into the depths of our being and witness what emerges.
When I approach understanding the world around me with this same process of deep looking, I find surface interpretations often give way to a deeper and more complex story. Whether it’s what the nightly news tells us about terrorism, global warming or economic policy, it is my opinion that our cultural myths are consistently and demonstrably untrue. At best they are a simplistic facade covering complexity and nuance, at worst — outright lies.
I therefore have a lot of sympathy with the conspiracy theory position. It’s abundantly clear to me we still live in an age of empires, that intelligence agencies work hand in glove with terrorists and the Green movement is co opted as a cover for neocolonialism. All points conspiracy theorists would typically embrace.
I depart from, at least some forms of conspiracy theory, in that I do not find I arrive at a new and solid understanding of the world, just with a different set of facts. This process of deep looking reveals a world that is ambiguous and best explained through employing many different lenses, often giving rise to contradictory perspectives.
In this brief essay I hope I have provided something of an explanation for the connection between my spiritual and conspiratorial positions, specifically regarding how they both arise out of the same method of thinking. I do not think it is comprehensive, there must be a good dollop of cynicism in me too to go down such dark avenues. I would be interested to better understand how different types of people may be conceptualising things in a quite different manner. I might speculate further on this in future articles.
I do also feel strongly that spirituality itself offers us a way through this divide. If we can connect within ourselves to a place that’s beyond our attachments to opinions, we have the opportunity to take on another’s point of view and see the world in a different way.
