Soon after one begins to study religion phenomenologically — that is, as the record of actual experiences — one discovers that spirituality unfolds in two modes: the passive and the active.

The passive mode is retrospective. It contemplates the experiences of others, codified in the monuments of civilization: the Bible and the Qur’an in the West; the Vedas, Pali Canon, and Tibetan and Chinese Tripitakas in the East; and a vast hierarchy of related texts, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the Zohar, the Nag Hammadi, the Upanishads, and the I Ching. These archives of revelation and reflection form what we call religious tradition. They are extraordinary achievements of human genius, repositories of beauty, sublimity, and insight — yet all have been shaped by the feudal ages that transmitted them, ages in which hierarchy and authority were taken for granted.

The active mode of spirituality is different. It is not content merely to study revelation; it seeks revelation. It pursues direct experience of transcendence through deliberate experiment — what older languages called ascesis or yoga. Such acts of inquiry can be dangerous, even destabilizing. They expose the practitioner to the raw forces of psyche and cosmos. But they are also the origin of religion itself. Every canon began as someone’s experience.

In contrast to orthodoxy’s collective conservatism, active spirituality is individual, creative, and often disruptive. Orthodoxy, like modern secularism, values conformity; both are collectivist by temperament. The religious establishment clings to authority; the technocratic order clings to method. Each defends its own ideology. Neither easily tolerates the solitary experimenter.

Heidegger remarked that “science does not think.” His warning applies even more forcefully today. Science and religion, the twin bureaucracies of modern civilization, now coexist in an uneasy alliance: one governs matter, the other morals. Together they preserve social order but often suppress direct insight — the living flame of gnosis that first gave birth to them both.

This tension crystallizes in the contemporary hysteria over psychedelics. Their criminalization reveals how profoundly modern society fears the uncontrolled rediscovery of direct experience. Huxley foresaw this in his vision of scientific totalitarianism; McKenna speculated that our very evolution was triggered by early encounters with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Whether or not that is true, the symbolic truth remains: consciousness evolves through contact with mystery.

When one studies the history of spiritual technique phenomenologically, one finds recurrent patterns — ritual, rhythm, breath, fasting, music, symbol, and sometimes entheogens — all of which open the same doorways of perception. Jung’s theory of archetypes, Eliade’s shamanic universals, and the anthropology of ecstasy converge upon a single insight: the capacity for transcendence is innate and repeatable. Properly approached, these methods induce not pathology but illumination, not alienation but integration.

Eliade observed that shamans were often the most psychologically balanced members of their societies. By contrast, modern culture interprets the same experiences as pathology. What was once initiation is now “psychosis”; what was once ecstasy is now “delusion.” The old religious intolerance has simply been replaced by medical intolerance.

The result is a new kind of heresy: the individual’s right to direct experience. Whether through disciplined meditation or visionary catalysts, the active exploration of consciousness remains the unacknowledged foundation of religion and the living antidote to collective conformity.

The path itself has never ceased. Its arrows still fly — straight, luminous, and perilous — into the heart of Being.