For the stringent materialist, everything I’ve just described is reasonable as long as it’s understood to be playacting, experience hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.
However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I’m describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness.
Yes, plenty of New Age and woo-woo practices don’t make any sense or lead only unto pyramid schemes; there are traps for the credulous all over. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age (and even sometimes to professional skeptics), makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe’s mysteries — if you’re starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.
But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it’s also important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror movie but nonetheless skated over in a lot of American spirituality: the importance of being really careful in your openness and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.
My Wednesday column: Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful:https://t.co/zkkGJh4JPw
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 1, 2023