YouTube is My Guru
And it may be yours
In the journey between yesterday and tomorrow are a lot of unknowns and none of them could be more interesting than the changing relationship we have with the transcendent nature of our beings. In this landscape of social media we can see the seeds of a type of spiritual “nomadism.” In 2016 I became aware of this in myself and saw it in others.
Some ridicule the spiritualized media experience with jokes, and I do too, but somewhere between “woo-woo” tropes and established spiritual pathways, the ones we identify as religions, there is something worth noting. This movement may seem disjointed and very much full of feel good spiritual options that offer no real method for growth and initiation, but maybe that’s OK. In fact, this may be the liminal time when all of these spiritual paths and the religious practices create new versions of all the religions we currently have in the world. Perhaps this spiritual nomadism is proof of our technological development, of our changing levels of maturity as we move from sun god models to those more nuanced and informed by the realities of of decentralized networks.
In this spiritual nomadism many might see an unraveling of traditions and cultures, but this unraveling is also creating something that matches the times and the technology. As we get to the next iteration of spirituality the material we use to create meaning must and is changing with the times.
In an age of distributed tech, in an age of an increasingly distributed Self — one that exists in many spaces both physically and virtually, there is a new agency.
This agency and this transiting self, the one that moves from one mobile app to another, or from a business space to a game space and back again; is finding its way to a new spiritual paradigm that is more relatable to this new type of experiential body. This link between body and spirituality is both eternal and subject to external, temporal, revisions.
We all know WitchTok is a thing, and that meditation apps are a big business, but there is more than that.
For me it’s on YouTube that I attend lectures and gather useful teachings. It’s there that I first rediscovered Alan Watts. As a child I heard Watts on the radio. Usually taking refuge from the loud immigrant family surrounding me I would put on headphones and scour the airwaves, finding Watts and taking in his words. From radio to internet, I can trace that line in my own experience. As the years continue I see Watts all over YouTube, and I have seen him referenced on signs held up across the country, at protests and sit-ins. The rise of consciousness that Watts was part of, the act of combining eastern and western spiritual traditions, and uncovering the more subtle, esoteric and theological aspects of both, were and are profoundly resonant to this day.
Some spiritual offerings on social platforms are suspect and feel rather ungrounded, while others bring vetted teachings to me without a trip to an ashram. Observing others, I know I’m not alone.
For most of the pandemic Robert Thurman the Buddhist scholar was my teacher, reading weekly through the Flower Ornament Sutra. Recently I tuned into Lama Tsultrim Allione, and received a Guru Rinpoche meditation through her. That’s some pretty heart-centered and heady stuff (both at the same time), and that is unlike any other time in human history.
I’ve seen both of these people live and in the flesh before, but over time and space I can still see them and learn from them in between the rest of my life.
Whereas WitchTok is fast and depends on the platform’s speediness to help deliver its appeal, on YouTube the videos I watch take a while. An hour doesn’t seem like much but in today’s attention economy, that’s quite a bit. Now, you may say I’m mixing up true religions and real philosophies with a mishmash of spiritual tricks and babble. I would say that’s exactly what is happening, and that this is what we might expect from this kind of transitional period.
According to Pew Research, the very religious amongst us tend to hold to legacy media formats, while the spiritually inclined often embrace technologies that are endemic to the landscape of the internet.
One in ten US adults use an app daily to help them pray or find gratitude. Some groups that are highly spiritual and religious are notable for embracing apps, and that includes Evangelicals and those from historically Black Protestant traditions. Meanwhile a lot of Gen Z in particular find that being spiritual means being in nature.
What is the nature of today’s world?
Our physical landscape and our sense of nature are part of our changing consciousness and so are other factors, such as development and displacement. In a world with more tourism, more migrants from war and from climate, this displacement grows. The mixups and mashups, the remixing of our spiritual and religious selves will most likely continue within this context of complexity.
When one paradigm gives way to another, everything changes with it. With the end of the industrial age and the rise of the computing the rise of extremism and oppressive orthodoxies are the last grand stands of the old paradigm. In its place comes a new paradigm, one where artistic, created landscapes and new, post-apocalyptic physical landscapes merge. From this experience of transition, from an old Earth to a new one, a diversity of religious and spiritual imagery, practices and traditions emerge quite naturally. Some of the authoritarian regimes of the world will try to continue forcing people into the old hierarchies, in fact we see that in a fever pitch throughout the globe, but it won’t stick.
The old guard can not force the rest of us stay unimaginative, and in many ways unalive in our approach to spirituality. To be alive is to be conscious and this means a person has to have agency in how they address the divine.
Religious change at this level has happened before and will happen again. And if you need further proof, consider this fascinating trip through Christian art with critic and scholar Waldemar Januszczak. He charts quite beautifully the changes to imagery where Jesus appeared as a Harry Potter style young man with a wand, to a powerful ruler as was befitting Christianity’s adoption into the Roman Empire.
Whether you’re like me mashing up Buddhist chants with haunting compositions by 10th century German abbess Hildegard Von Bingen, no matter if you’re a self-defining witch, druid, or whatever you are, there is a good chance that the way you learn and maintain your spiritual and religious experiences will evolve. With every shift in technological paradigm, there comes a new face, style and yes, a new guru.
BONUS —
If you can handle a current example of this in performative art, then check out Laurie Anderson’s lectures on poetry. These Norton lectures pretty much get to the heart of how what we do, how we live and believe is the result of poetry.
Our buildings, all our architecture soft and hard; all of our technological and other experiences — these are our landscapes of a today that creates many tomorrows.
Last Side Note:
Currently I work with a group that is steeped in Vedic tradition and we have an academic mapping machine learning pathways to their analogues throughout nature, including to the human brain. As this all grows into being, we might find that spiritual machines might exist.
It’s an amazing time to be alive. What are your thoughts?
