Singularity and the Re-Integration of Church and State

At the heart of Singularity is a post-Western Enlightenment re-integration of church and state.

But not in the way that might sound like.

The separation of church and state in the Western Enlightenment was an evolutionary breakthrough. No doubt about it.

No more monarchs violently dominating their citizens by virtue of divine right. No more supreme papal authority backing up torture and mass mind control. No more kings who want to get divorced from their first of six wives by making themselves head of a national church to be able to do so.   

At least not in modern western liberal democracies. The fusion of religious authority and government is still strong as ever in many nations of the world. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan are all cases in point.

The differentiation of church and state is no guarantee of virtue on the part of our governments. Secular governments are still often responsible for significant violations of human rights and their duty of care for their citizens.

And, where there has been and/or remains a fusion of church and state we often find some of the most heinous and horrifying acts of violence, control, and war in human history.

So, all that said, why would Singularity be standing for a reintegration of church and state?

‘Spiritual But Not Religious’

The answer starts with an important differentiation between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of our religious and spiritual traditions. This is a distinction most people, particularly in the West, are unaware of, and yet it is hugely significant.

Exoteric religion or spirituality relates to the outer aspects of a tradition and generally concerns itself with things like a creation story and what it means to live a basically good life. Think Genesis in the Bible or the Ten Commandments brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai.

Esoteric religion or spirituality relates to the inner aspects of a tradition and provides a set of transformational practices that support an individual to open up actual personal experience of the sacred realities at the heart of the tradition in ways that can activate their deepest potentials. Examples of this are the mystic or gnostic core of Christianity, Sufism in Islam, Kabbalah in Judaism, Vedanta or Shaiva Tantra in Hinduism, or many practice lineages within Buddhism.

Truly healthy religious or spiritual traditions will have both intact to support their people to live an ethical life with a sense of meaning, and to support those who feel ready to access transformational experiences that can accelerate their growth and demonstrate it through exemplary moral action and service to the society they are a part of.

Indeed, you could say that the distinction so many people now make in the modern West between whether someone is ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ is an expression of this difference between the exoteric and esoteric aspects.

Collective Awakening? No Thank You!

Most people in the modern west are unaware of this exoteric/esoteric distinction because we have an unfortunate history of hunting, imprisoning, persecuting, and/or killing those who were part of the esoteric aspects of our traditions.

Examples of this range from the Gnostic Christians to the Sufis in Islam to the Dzogchen and Jonang communities in Buddhism

Ever since the politicisation of early Christianity, those who engaged the transformational practices of esoteric spirituality were deemed to be threats to the power of the fused church and state.

Why? Because the personal access they gained to transformational insight and activation of their innate power and potentials were not mediated by and did not require someone else to be the middleman between them and god.

This made them free. It tended to liberate their hearts and minds into a revolutionary fire that cannot be contained, and it made them intimately aware that very same fire lives in every other being too. All things that felt very dangerous and unsavoury to those seeking to main religion-sponsored governmental control over their people.

So, while church and state were fused, church-ruled states tended to hunt down, imprison, persecute, and/or kill those involved in esoteric spirituality.

A Unifying Worldview

That was until church and state differentiated, which in large part happened because the in Western Enlightenment a whole new frequency of consciousness started to rise.

Suddenly rationality, logic, and empirical inquiry seemed to offer so many of us much better approaches for relating to life than blind belief and adherence to religious authority. Instead of theologians debating forever on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, we just started to look.

With this, groups practicing esoteric spirituality tended to be a bit safer. Still not totally safe, but safer. Without religious barriers separating groups of people so strongly, many nations started to become more world-centric, and the earliest beginnings of what went on to become globalisation began.

Over the course of all of this, from the times when church and state were fused to the Western Enlightenment and after, communities of esoteric practitioners all across the world were (while occasionally defending their lives) having radical breakthrough insights into the true nature of reality, the sacred power of the human being, and the activation of our potential to live a life in harmony and interconnectedness with the Earth we are a part of.

And fascinatingly, something we started realising when globalisation reached a point in the 20th century where we started to have access to the core insights of communities of esoteric practice all over the planet – from Buddhist yogis and yoginis, to Hindu sages and siddhas, to Sufi dancers, Christian mystics, and Kabalistic mystic-philosophers – is that while their reports of the reality they’d penetrated into had meaningful surface level differences, there are certain core realisations that are strikingly shared.

All of them had lineages of esoteric practice extending back at least over one millennia and often more where their practitioners again and again and again had claimed to penetrate into life changing realisations about the fundamental indivisible unity of all reality, its inherently divine nature, and that this is the essence and basis of all apparent difference and diversity in our world. This is the recognition at the heart of what has been called the Perennial Philosophy – the idea that there have been certain core truths that exist in the esoteric hearts of all our spiritual traditions through all time.

Added to this, in the latter part of the 20th century we started to become aware of certain other traditions of human development, both ancient and new, that had generated critical insights into the nature of human experience.

The Western psychological tradition, from Freud’s psychoanalysis to Jung’s analytic psychology to behaviourism, developmental psychology, humanistic psychology and positive psychology, which offers us a rich pathway for what it means to be a healthily individuated self that can live in right relationship with ourselves and those around us.

And the indigenous shamanic traditions of the planet, whether of North or South America, Africa, Oceania, or Asia, that contain abundant guidance on how to live in right relationship with the living earth and ecosystems we are a part of.

The Burden of Proof

The claim of all these traditions is that they have gained radical, life-changing insights into realisations about life, ourselves, and the earth that are true and have huge significance for humanity as a whole.

Of course, one can say, “But isn’t that just the same as the exoteric religions that claim they know what’s going on and demand our belief”? The answer is a resounding ‘no’. This is not the same.

The reason is that while the cosmologies and creation stories of our exoteric religious traditions demand our belief and compliance with some higher authority, the realisations of our esoteric spiritual traditions are not about belief but rather direct experience. They are not set in stone because someone else said so, but rather have been fleshed out through the repeated experience of practitioners over millennia having the same realisations.

And as such, they tend to align themselves much more with the foundational principles of the scientific method than they do religious orthodoxy.

The philosophy of science, as given to us by such greats as David Hume and Karl Popper, tells us that true science is based on such principles as empiricism, reliability, validity, and peer review.

Empiricism means that instead of centralising belief about reality, we create experiments to directly look at it to gather data.

Every serious esoteric practice session is exactly that. An experiment done to gain data by direct experience. Yes, a crucial difference is that science tends to apply this to the outer world of the senses whereas esoteric spirituality applies it to inner experience. And this latter approach can still be just as rigorous, as William James described in his Variates of Religious Experience when discussing it as ‘radical empiricism.’

Reliability means that when multiple people do the same experiment, if they do it the prescribed way they will get the same result. Esoteric spiritual practice absolutely fulfils this criterion. The millennia old lineages of shared realisation attest to this.

Validity is a bit trickier. In science, validity means that the data we gather from an experiment actually represents reality. The issue here is that humanity has not yet developed scientific experiments sufficient to test the realisations about the true nature of reality that come back from esoteric practitioners. That said, these realisations do share the fascinating quality of being ‘self-validating.’ Another point William James made in his Varieties of Religious Experience when describing the kind of transformative realisations that are accessed in esoteric communities of practice is that they tend to have what he called the ‘noetic’ quality. This means that an aspect of the experience is that it comes with the irrefutable sense that one has experienced something fundamentally and undeniably true. This is expressed in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism where certain meditation texts say that once one has had the core insight into the true nature of reality oneself, a thousand buddhas could come and knock on one’s door to say it isn’t true, and one would be able to comfortably just close the door.

The last criterion of the scientific method, where the data collected then undergoes peer review, is also comfortably satisfied by the esoteric communities of practice in the world, where core insights and realisations are routinely compared and scrutinised with other contemplatives to assess authenticity.

The Emergence of a Global Wisdom Tradition

The position we take in Singularity is that based on these criteria being satisfied, today humanity has access to realisations about the true nature of reality, life, ourselves, and the earth from communities and traditions of esoteric practice across the world that must be included in how we navigate right life together.

More than that, our position is that these insights are especially critical in this time of planetary crisis, which is in large part fuelled by a major crisis of meaning and imbalance of our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the earth.

It is our position that the rise of humanity’s awareness of the wisdom held by these different communities of practice across the world at this time is an expression of a new phase of our evolution where we can heal and go beyond the war between science and spirituality to create a culture that can integrate religion, science, and transformational spirituality for the one humanity.

This is the post-Western enlightenment integration of church and state that Singularity stands for.