Tomer Persico knows the insides and outs of the contemporary Israeli religious scene. He is a keen observer of the various spiritual trends in both Orthodox and secular society writing about them in the media, in scholarly articles, and on his important blog. He writes a widely read blog, — occasionally he writes in English for his English language blog or his posts are translated in English by the papers, but the good stuff is in Hebrew–which presents an entrance into the many facets of contemporary Israeli spiritually. I know some people who only read my blog and his blog. If you don’t know about his blog, then you should. Besides, observing the religious world, Persico teaches at Tel Aviv University and is a fellow at the Hartman institute. His voice is a growing influence in Israeli culture as an exemplar, in that, he is a secular Israeli who turned to Jewish spirituality who provides the Israeli audience with a glimpse into the best (and worst) of Judaism.

In addition to his social role, Persico recently released his first book, based on his Tel Aviv University doctorate, on Jewish meditation. In order to cover both of these aspects well, this blog will have two posts dedicated to Tomer Persico, today we will discuss his new book on meditation and in a follow-up post we will discuss his spiritual journey and religious views.

Persico’s first book was just published as Jewish Meditation: The Development of Spiritual Practices in Contemporary Judaism [Hebrew] —available here. The book is a 500-page opus surveying the entire history of Jewish meditation creating a new and fresh perspective on the history of Jewish religiosity by surveying actual spiritual practices, similar to many a book on Buddhism or Hinduism. Persico provides his own typology of different types of meditative practice in order to compare the different approaches. The book starts with a rapid survey of medieval positions, then moves to showing the Hasidic practices as part of a world historic turn to interiority. He takes a serious interest in the Piesetzna Rebbe and Menachem Eckstein as the dawn of modern practices. The latter half of the book presents the American counter culture, Jewish Renewal, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi as the sea-change of a new Judaism culminating into a flowering of various new age, Neo-Hasidic, Jewish renewal, and Israeli new age spirituality. Finally, the work surveys contemporary forms of Jewish meditation in Israel including various Chabad, Breslov, the reception of Aryeh Kaplan, and new age practices.

The author brings to the topic a mastery of the literature, an exceptional ability to understand religious phenomena, a sensitivity to the psychological aspects of the study of meditation, and a deep familiarity with the literature in religious studies on varying levels of consciousness.

The book should be read by all those interested in Jewish mysticism, kabbalah, and Jewish spirituality. Even the casual reader would gain from skimming the topics of personal interest. The first run of a thousand copies sold out quickly. The non-Hebrew reading public deserves to have this book translated into English, (especially if you know of a donor) but the Hebrew length would produce an 800 page English book. The work will stand as a reference on my shelf for both its content and vast bibliography.

Persico sees himself as part of, or offshoot of, Jewish Renewal in an expanded definition, in that, he is seeking a path of Jewish spirituality after the paradigm shift to an open and individual life. The same way the New Religious Zionists started after the breakdown of the older vision in the 1990’s, so too the older secularism brook down into an Israeli New-Age. But in Persico’s journey, Aryeh Kaplan and Hindu meditation were also equally important, and he integrates the wisdom of both Rav Aharon Lichtenstien and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

The book has a clear thesis in seeing the turn of contemporary Judaism in the last half century as a shift toward a more internal religion of meditation and inwardness. This thesis has two parts: the first is showing the various expressive, utilitarian, and new age ideas that have found their way even into traditional practices. The second is the sea- change of civilization from a transcendent external religion to one of internality and spirituality. At many points, this thesis of religion overtakes the interest in meditation.

The first one is about how the counter-culture begat the New Age and Jewish Renewal begat the Israeli New Age began the Haredi appropriations of the New Age. His unified approach does not get involved in the diverse and contradictory cultural settings of current practices showing their functional use in a given age. He uses an abstraction of New Age as a unified concept without the thick description of LSD, progressive politics, self-help literature, Burning Man, and La Leche leagues nor the breakdown into decades and contradictory trends. For English readers, who want to know more about the turn to spirituality in the last fifty years, I recommend Robert Wuthnow’s now classic After Heaven: Spirituality in American since the 1950’s (1998) and for more examples of the self-development utilitarian reframing of traditional practices in our era of late modernity, I recommend Véronique Altglas, From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage.

The second part is that Persico sees an evolution of civilization from the former religious age to what Charles Taylor calls in his recent seminal work of the same title The Secular Age, where religion is now immanent in personal meanings and moral orders, which Persico links to the New Age in influence and varieties. Taylor, however, was discussing the entire Western culture not just New Age and spirituality. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s paradaigm shift and Taylor’s imminant frame are not the same. In my opinion, Persico selectively focuses on meditation and does not situate the change as part of a much bigger global shift that also includes the interiority of contemporary novels, Korean Pentecostals, Heaven is for Real, Anne Lamont, Rick Warren, and Stuart Smalley. Persico’s book links microstudies on specific forms of recent new-age spirituality with the macro-study of an overall progression of eighteenth to twenty-first century secularism and now post-secularism. They should have remained separate. In addition, most Jewish Renewal spirituality is of song, emotions, non-duality, and healing not meditation or techniques of bettering self.

I have many minor differences and corrections from Persico’s approach that do not detract from his accomplishment but I must point out the Musar movement is glaringly missing except for one page and musar has the most techniques that we call mediation from Rabbis Israel Salanter and Dessler to the rise of American new age musar.

In conclusion, the important upshot of Tomer Persico’s writing is to stop thinking that contemporary usage of Hasidism by modern Jews either as Neo-Hasidism or neo-Chassidus or even as a hasidic meditative technique is just a phenomena of retrieval or the direct usage of eighteenth century Hasidism idea today. Persico’s approach is to be honest about the new approach as part of contemporary and not to pretend one is doing pre-modern practices or teaching pre-modern ideas. The new Hasidic usages are part of New Age ideas, goals, and practices that make use of or are grafted onto older traditions but should be explained as part of contemporary spirituality.

My English readers can find an ample taste of Persico’s approach in his online articles. For example, he discusses the utilitarian self of inner transformation and self-improvement in contemporary Israeli spirituality to show how it transformed contemporary Breslov practice. Or in another article, this time on romantic expressionism and contemporary spirituality that weaves together into a single whole Rabbi Menachem Eckstien, Rav Shagar, Rav Ginzburgh, and contemporary Breslov teachers.

1) Why start with a quote from Rav Aharon Lichtenstein quote from the Orthodox Forum?

I take Rabbi Lichtenstein as a well known authority not only on Halakha, but on the dialogue between Halakha and the modern world (“Tora U’Mada”, etc’). Lichtenstein writes: “The antinomy is real and the tension immanent”. The quote shows explicitly how for him there is a fundamental tension between law and spirituality. I wanted to lay the ground from the beginning that we are dealing here with two equally important principles that cannot wholly overlap. Later in the book I of course develop the fruits produced by this tension.

2) What is the purpose and innovation of your book?

The purpose, first of all, is to present for the first time a panoramic, academically valid, map of the, so to speak, major trends in Jewish meditation. As a scholar of contemporary spirituality I focused on seven teachers of Jewish meditation that worked in the 20th century and work today, but in order to understand the roots of their practices I had to uncover what was before them of course. Next, I wanted to analyze the social and cultural forces behind the changes and different vectors that the Jewish meditative tradition went through and towards.

Now, in order to demonstrate the changes in and between meditative traditions, and in order to competently compare Jewish meditative traditions and meditative traditions from other religious traditions (and so also determine were there has been influence or a wholesale appropriation of techniques) I had to devise a typology of meditative methods (and of the mystical states that they aspire to lead to). That is also, I feel, an important innovation of the book.

The book, therefore, contributes to current research on three areas: that of the study of Jewish mysticism and contemporary spirituality by presenting and analyzing past meditative traditions and central contemporary representative teachers of meditation; in the area of the study of mysticism and meditation in general, by presenting a detailed typology for evaluating different characteristics of meditative practice and mystical experience; and in the study of Jewish culture by examining the above findings while noting the cultural conditions necessary for the transformation of Jewish meditation, that is through placing them in a general socio-cultural context.

3) Why include Maimonides and the Early Kabbalah?

I tried to include any instance were a major figure or school laid down instructions for meditation, or that such instructions could be, without too much loose interpretation, be understood from their practice. Maimonides has clear instructions for meditation (such that anyone slightly experienced in mindfulness meditation cannot, I think, miss). Early Kabbalah and Cordovero do not indeed play a part in my book, because of lack of such. Abulafia gives us the most elaborate and straightforward meditative instructions in the Jewish tradition before the 20th century, and he indeed gets a whole chapter of his own, and There is of course a whole chapter on Lurianic Yichudim and Kavvanot, which I place as techniques connected with a form of mythical thinking that characterize Luria and his group.

4) How was the 20th century a change? Why are Rabbi Menachem Eckstein and the Piesetzna Rebbe important?

From the beginning of the 20th century, that is beginning with the work of Eckstein and the Piesetzna Rabbi, we find a clear rise in the interest in mindfulness and introspective work. Meditative techniques are much more introverted, delving in, deep in, our psyche. They are also somewhat more focused on bringing calm and clarity, and not ecstasy or an effluence of the emotional life. Eckstein and the Piesetzna Rabbi are the first to exhibit such characteristics. They are also the first to espouse a Neo-Hasidic ethos that is committed to the Halakha (as opposed to Buber’s Neo-Hasidism, for example, that was of course adamantly not committed).

Now why is this so? Well, that’s what I try to elaborate on in the book. In very few words, beginning with the reformation we can see a process in which the North Atlantic culture developed increased involvement and attention with the individual’s inner life, and an enhanced relation to the inner life as a source of meaning, authority and identity. What certain thinkers (my own favorite is Charles Taylor) call “the great subjective turn of Western culture”. This process comes to a sort of peak in the 20th century, and becomes a major cultural movement since the 1960’s.

5) What was the change of contemporary spirituality and new age? Why is it important and why is it important to your thesis?

During the 1960’s our culture experienced a shift in focus, in which our feelings, experiences, and sense of individual unique identity became sources of meaning and authority for us (more than ever before, and in a significant way, that is). This affected all areas of our life: education, medicine, politics etc’. Of course it also affected religion. The traditional, pre-modern concept of religion as a communal system of habits and values into which one was born and to which one was committed finally gave way and now not only was one expected to choose his “denomination”, but one was internally obligated, as it were, to be totally faithful to his inner convictions and tailor-make an individual spiritual path of his or her own. This is the era that the old, worn out brand “religion” was replaced with the young and hip “spirituality”, and New Age culture became a mainstream phenomenon. Of course this is just a privet manifestation of a much bigger social and cultural process.

Now, the New Age is not only indebted to this process for its popularity, it is also formed by it in essence. The religion of the New Age is a private, internal, expressive and experiential religion. It is very much involved with our inner lives and sees the place of religious action and significance in our emotional and psychological makeup. Following this, the meditative methods that evolved in our era are all concerned with our interiority. This is, by the way, why there is so much appropriation from the Far East – because inner directed meditation was developed there long before it was in the West, and they can offer us great traditions of such spiritual practices. Now Judaism of course is not divorced from the cultural transformations of the West, and as such developed an interest in inner life as well. What I try to analyze in my book is how that interest played out. What meditative methods were developed, how past traditions were reconstructed, and where and when were foreign, mainly of course Eastern, practices imported and converted.

6) Why is Jewish Renewal important?

It is important because is displays one way that the Jewish tradition responds to modernity, and in particular to the developments I mentioned above. Jewish Renewal is a vibrant and complex cultural phenomenon that seeks to integrate our contemporary sensitivity to psychological and emotional life with the Jewish tradition, which historically, except for Hasidism, did not give much space for psychology or emotions. The challenge is thus not small. Look at the transformation Reb Zalman has made in his life and in the lives of others. As he would say, it’s about a “paradigm shift”, which involves a translation of the Jewish tradition into an non-exclusivist, but inclusive and egalitarian, world religion. As mentioned above, there is also an inherent tension here, between important elements of the tradition like Halakha and this modern direction. Jewish Renewal deals with this tension many times by letting go of Halakha, and at other times by translating ritual and mitzvah to spiritual language. This is also an interesting development worth studying.

As for me, I see myself a part of the Jewish Renewal. I am a spiritual seeker in the Jewish tradition, trying to base my relationship with the divine on Jewish ground. I am also convinced that inner transformation is essential for true spirituality, and that outer obedience to the Halakha, however important, is not all that God demands of us. I therefore seek a Jewish Spiritual path, and the Jewish Renewal offers quite a few options towards that goal.

7) How did the New-Age come to Israel? Why is it important?

The New Age came to Israel only in the 1990’s. Very briefly, since the 1980’s changes in the economic thought and structure, in the political system, in the justice system and in Israeli demographics led to abandoning the Zionist secular socialist republican ethos that characterized Israeli society under the rule of the old Labor movement, (Mapai), and encouraged the rise of a liberal, indivisualist ethos. Mainly I would say that developments in the economic sphere (neo-liberalism, privatization) were accompanied by parallel adjustments in social and cultural field. Globalization brought not only products but also Western (especially American) ideals and social trends, principally the individualistic ethos of self-fulfillment. The Israeli individual now saw herself not as an integral part of the people, drawing its values and goals from the collective, but as an autonomous unit that stands apart from society, and indeed before it both ontologically and ethically.

These developments allowed the privatization of the spiritual quest: the individual was empowered as sole authority in matters concerning her spiritual path and even religious identity. The various elements to fill her spiritual world were gathered from the spiritual marketplace that grew around her. For the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel the religious and spiritual field was diversified and woven into numerous parallel channels. On the other hand, the collapse of the secular Zionist worldview also created the need for a new definition of Israeli Jewishnness (for those who were not Orthodox).

In simple words, the Israeli secular individual now needed to answer for herself how exactly she was Jewish. Some decided it did not matter, and completely ignored the Jewish tradition. This makes for either Israeli cosmopolitanism or Israeli non-Jewish New Age (e.g. Yoga centers, channelers, etc’).

But some, maybe most, engaged with the tradition from this new perspective. Now this new perspective was of course liberal and individualistic, and it led to a whole new Jewish discourse, sometimes called (depending on the speaker) “pluralistic”, “spiritual”, or “neo-Reform”. It was no longer based on the premise that the Jewish Orthodox establishment faithfully represented the authentic Jewish tradition. Quite the opposite, it wanted to reclaim Jewish heritage – especially Talmudic, Kabbalistic and Chassidic – as a part of secular Israeli identity.

8) Why was Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan so important and what did he contribute?

Basically Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan was the first to bring the Shem Ha’Meforash “Jewish Meditation” into wide public knowledge. When he published his books on the subject it was a great novelty – that indeed, the Jewish tradition was not all Halakha, holidays and yiddishkeit, but had spiritual techniques that the individual could employ in order to spiritually develop. Now Kaplan did this in direct response to the rapidly growing interest in the end of the 70’s with meditation. We have to remember that this is the time that TM (Transcendental Meditation) is teaching literally millions(!) of Americans how to meditate, that ISKCON (a.k.a. Hare Krishna) has long gained popularity and visibility, that Yoga has become widespread, etc’.

Kaplan himself writes explicitly in his Jewish Meditation (published posthumously in 1985) that “Today, many American Jews have become involved in Eastern religions […] and large percentages follow disciplines such as Transcendental Meditation.” So that no doubt troubled him, and he sought to answer this problem (from his point of view of course) by presenting Jewish meditative methods. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most common method he teaches in his books is Mantra meditation.

9) What did Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi contribute?

In my book I write about Reb Zalman’s contribution to the Jewish meditative field, and he of course contributed much, much more. Being arguably the central pillar of the Jewish Renewal movement from its beginning, there is a lot we can say about Reb Zalman. But if we limit ourselves to meditation, it must be noted first that Reb Zalman did found the first meditation group and publish the first meditative manual of the Jewish Renewal. The “Chapel Group” in Winnipeg where he taught (in Manitoba U), and from which came in 1958 the booklet The First Step, with Chabad style meditative instructions accompanied with some of the Piesetzna’s guided imagination exercises. He actually got a Haskama from the Lubavitcher Rabbi on that text. But his later work, such as Paradigm Shift (1993), Gate to the Heart (1993) and The Gates of Prayer (2011), is of course much more important. In these he lays out a fully developed system of meditation, still in dialogue with Chabadic meditation but also integrating Buddhism mindfulness methods. Indeed, with Reb Zalman we can see a movement over time from Chabad style meditation to Mindfulness.

Now what in my opinion is of crucial importance is the openness and honesty with which Reb Zalman introduces non-Jewish methods. He does not hide his intentions and pretends that he “finds” them in the Bible or the Kabbalah, like Kaplan. He says quite openly that he thinks that they are generic spiritual “technologies” that are very valuable and that should be used by Jews today in order to get closer to God. Reb Zalman has a very thought out and sophisticated worldview along which he works, and he is committed to his own and to the different traditions’ integrity. This is a path held also by another important voice in Jewish Renewal, Arthur Green, who speaks about the importance of intellectual honesty.

While I do not follow neither Reb Zalman nor (Prof’ Rabbi) Green teachings as a whole, this is a principle that for me is also very important, and, by the way, looking at it from a sociological point of view, is another religious sign of our times (I mean by that that as modern people we regard authenticity and integrity, being true to ourselves and not “faking it”, as very important. We do not want a religious life that conflicts with different parts of our selves. That is also why we have an ingrained biast against ritual, that for many of us feels “fake” of “mechanical”).

10) Why is contemporary Breslov so important?

Breslov today is an extremely important social and cultural focal point in Israel. Since the 1990’s it has experienced an unprecedented burgeoning, and is undoubtedly the fastest growing Hasidic group in Israel. It is one of the primary sites for welcoming BT Jews (and indeed, most of Breslov today is Ba’aley Teshuvah), produces the yearly Rosh Ha’Shana festival in Uman that attracts tens of thousands, and is the inspiration of multifarious artistic expressions, with Bratslav oriented singer-songwriters, musicians and poets attracting media attention and a large audience in Israel today. There is really no way not to notice Breslov in some form or another in Israel.

Breslov is also specifically important for my research, as it practices “Hitbodedut”. This is an hour a day practice that Rabbi Nachman laid out for all his followers. Today, the situation being that many Jews, among then many BT Jews, are seeking some form of meditative practice, this one hour observance can be used as an place holder for whatever meditative method a Rabbi would want to insert. There are today a great many different Breslov rabbis, really small scale Hasidic Tzadiks, that lead small circles – some tens or hundreds – of followers and form communities. They differ in spirit and in demographic makup (more or less Haredi, Ashkenazi of Miztrachi, spiritual seekers or community builders, etc’).

In my research I studied two prominent contemporary Breslov spiritual leaders Rabbis Yisrael Yitzchak Besancon and Erez Moshe Doron). Besancon, born in France in 1944, was a student of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Bender, one of the most influential Bratslav leaders of the twentieth century, but today belongs to the “Na-Nach” group, who follow the late Yisroel Ber Odesser. He leads a small community in Tel-Aviv, and is popular amongst National Religious youth.

What I found out is that each diverge from the basic teachings of Rabbi Nachman and teach a more introverted, inner-directed meditation technique. Besancon teaches a more Vipassana-like technique and Doron a mantra based technique (itself based on Aryeh Kaplan’s teachings). Now why do they not simply repeat Rabbi Nachman’s instructions that teach a dialogical, very emotional, very ecstatic meditative path? There are a few reasons for this, but not least is the current wish for introspective techniques prevalent in contemporary spirituality circles.

From a Persico article:

Rabbi Erez Moshe Doron is one of the most popular leaders of the Bratslav BT upsurge. Born in 1962, Doron began his own spiritual quest at the beginning of the 1980’s. He joined the Israeli Union for Parapsychology, and within two years became its chairman. In a popular media interview he recalls he was exposed there to “a salad of ideas: a bit of east, a bit of west, a bit of Judaism.” (Doron eventually started a process of Teshuva, finding his place in the Bratslav community. Today he heads the Lev Ha’Devarim organization for the propagation of Bratslav teachings, and is a self-proclaimed “authority for questions regarding Hitbodedut.” The defines the latter as a “Jewish method of disconnecting consciousness from the senses and connecting it to the higher worlds. [… Hitbodedut is] a spiritual practice which is able to detach man from tangible reality and connect him to much deeper levels. (Ibid. 30-31) Elsewhere Doron describes Hitbodedut as “the original and most amazing martial art”, able to overcome “the slings and arrows of the cruel adversary – the arrows of despair, the arrows of negligence, the arrows of deadly sadness or the arrows of vainglory and other anesthetic drugs” (Doron 2008b: 17-18) Doron’s meditative method is from the Rabbi Nachman’s teachings on Hitbodedut (who never mentions the use of a mantra), and how much they rather resemble Yoga-like concentration based techniques (Persico 2012: 634; Persico 2013). Hitbodedut is no longer seen as a special period during the day meant to enable the Bratslav Hasid to find intimacy with the divine. It is a method for self manipulation and adjustment. Hitbodedut affects not only the self. Doron describes Hitbodedut as a “weapon”, to be used by the Bratslav Hasid: politically against Ishmael (i.e., the Arab and/or Muslim world) (Doron 2008b: 14), and metaphysically in order to bring about redemption (Ibid. 15). As such it is of course of great importance, and Doron wishes to “open schools for Hitbodedut, where children will systematically and deeply study its ways and gates, and in which generations of warriors of light will be raised, seekers of true freedom” (Ibid. 21). Rabbi Israel Isaac Besancon was born in France in 1944. After immigrating to Israel he became a student of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Bender, one of the most influential Bratslav leaders of the twentieth century. Today he belongs to the “Na-Nach” sub-court, which follows the late Yisroel Ber Odesser, and leads his own community within it. Located in Tel-Aviv, it is popular amongst young Religious-Zionist Israelis. Besancon teaches that Hitbodedut is “the key of keys”, “the weapon that will allow us to conquer the world”, a “secret”, disclosed by Rabbi Nachman and meant to help the individual Jew reach “personal redemption” (Besancon 2001: 4). Indeed, for Besancon Hitbodedut is the path to “original Judaism”, meant to transform its practitioners into “true Jews” (Ibid. 84). Indeed, for Besancon what Rabbi Nachman taught is quite similar to Buddhist meditation. “In its essence, the goal of Hitbodedut is to disconnect our consciousness, even partly, from all the stimulations that pull it in different and scattered directions, in order to connect it back to its spiritual root. This temporary disconnection from the noisy surroundings brings calm, mental stability, that help us found personal relationships with our Maker, to learn to be assisted by Him, blessed be He, and to win a measure of Devekut – which promises us supreme spiritual happiness.” Obviously, the prime objective of Besancon’s Hitbodedut has ceased to be the divine, and is now the human self. It is this self that learns how to utilize the practice for its own well being, while using God to help it on its journey. Hitbodedut for Besancon is a technique for bringing God’s light down into the self. Whereby Rabbi Nachman it as an encounter in which the self annuls itself and rises up to God. I have written elsewhere on the obvious influence of Vipassana meditation on Besancon’s interpretation of Hitbodedut (Persico 2012: 627-430; Persico 2013).

11) What did Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh contribute?

In terms of Jewish Meditation? Not a lot. This was a bit of a surprise for me. Rabbi Ginzburgh, a foremost Kabbalist and a major influence on the religious ultra-nationalists (but anti-Zionists), talks a lot about a “consciousness revolution” as a fundamental step on the way to a full “life according to the Torah” in Israel, so I assumed he also teaches meditative techniques towards that goal. Ginzburgh does teach a bit of classic Chabad meditation and a minor new breathing technique. On the other hand he lays little stress on his followers actually practicing those techniques. It’s really not what you would expect from such a creative person who also admits he has knowledge of Eastern methods, and has had a few mystical experiences.

12) What are your conclusions from your book? (pages 402-404)

When we take an eagle’s eye view of the different meditative traditions that developed since the first centuries CE we see, as I noted before, a distinct change in direction happening in the first centuries of the 20th century. We see an introspective, reflective direction, we see for the first time (with the possible, arguable, exception of Maimonides) instructions for development mindfulness and awareness, and we see an unmistakable rise in the mystical objective we first found in Hasidism, of what I call (following the philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger) “manipulation of the Phenomenal Self Model”, which we usually refer to as the nullification of the “I” in Unio Mystica.

Again, the interesting question for me is: So what? What does this mean? What does this say about our culture? Here again I turn to an analysis of the cultural and sociological processes that led to the great subjective turn of western culture.

13) What are the changes to Western religion that see?

In the Forward to the book I bring a quote from Emile Durkheim, who in the late 19th century already made the important distinction between two different kinds of Religion: The collective, traditional, coercive type, into which one is born and to which one is unquestionably devoted to, and the privet, novel, voluntary type, which one chooses to adopt and is the main authority as to her relationship to. It’s not that in the past the second type was never to be found, but what is special about our time is that it is not restricted to outstanding individuals or elite groups who create esoteric clubs, but is a mainstream and widespread phenomenon. As I said earlier, a major characteristic of this privet religion is that it is also inner-directed, and sees experiences, intuition and the emotional life as sources of religious meaning and authority.

How did this come about? Well, that’s basically what I try to explain in my book. In very short, it is an organic development of the Christian tradition, who from its genesis (St. Paul) laid emphasis on the inner life of the individual. This increased greatly in the Reformation of course. Add to this the rise of the modern subject, our modern emphasis on autonomy, uniqueness and authenticity not only as needs, as basic conceptions of the way we live, but as ideals and add the death of the transcendental God, killed by the lances of Enlightenment materialism and naturalism – and you get a self-oriented inner-directed religion that seeks meditative methods in order for one to connect not to the heavens, but to oneself or “the God within”.

Read part 2 here.