Evolving Spiritual Practice

Spiritual practice, like everything else in life, is evolving. What does this mean? By ‘Spiritual Practice’ I mean any activity that expands your sense of identity, for example meditation, contemplative philosophy, prayer, yoga, martial arts, psychedelics, transpersonal psychotherapy, fasting, visualisation, lucid dreaming, conscious parenting, forgiveness and much more. By ‘Evolving’ I mean that everything develops and adapts over time. Most of the spiritual traditions that have spawned these transformational practices emerged hundreds and often thousands of years ago in the pre-modern era. Modernity (rationality and science) and post-modernity (cultural diversity and the information age) are hugely influential historical periods that have happened since then, and I believe that contemporary spiritual practice needs to integrate the insights of these two worldviews as well as the premodern in order to keep being relevant and adaptive in a changing world.