The “new spiritualities” grow like mushrooms, notes Marc Bonomelli. For two years, the journalist has immersed himself in a heterogeneous nebula, ranging from neochamanism to personal development, including ecospritity.
words collected by Matthew Stricot
In his book Les Nouvelles Routes du Self (Arkhê, 320 pages, 19.90 euros), journalist Marc Bonomelli is interested in different forms of spirituality having emerged in recent years, surfing on secularization and individualism of Our contemporary societies. He thus shows that most of these “spiritual creatives”, not hesitating to mix very diverse practices, inscribe their quest for meaning in an ethical, social and political project.
“new spirituals” In which you are interested in taking a point in differentiating from traditional religions. Why?
Through the refusal of dogmas, these new spirituals reject any institution that would impose on us what we should believe rather than to do our own exploration and live our own experience. According to them, spirituality would be something pure, in openness, connection to oneself and to the universe, while religion would represent rigidity, closure and violence.
This is a very shared idea, conveyed in particular on social networks within this movement. We can thus find, on the Instagram accounts “conscious soul” or “astral dimension”, particularly followed, the image of a fish in a jar in the middle of the ocean to illustrate religion, and that of a fish in medium the ocean to illustrate spirituality.
Can we measure the number of followers of these new spiritualities?
The phenomenon is very difficult to quantify because anyone can be more or less concerned by at least a “spiritual” practice. As there is no institution, it is difficult to have a specific census … but the trend seems strongly upwards.
According to work carried out already more than a decade by sociologist Jean-Pierre Worms (cultural creatives in France, Yves Michel editions, 2007), 17 % of French people would be part of the family they call ” new spiritual “, or” spiritual creative “. You can also cite a IFOP survey published in 2020 , according to which 40 % of the under 35s believe in witchcraft, compared to 25 % for those over 35.
You find that the path of certain spiritual researchers Start after a mystical experience under the effect of psychotropic drugs … can we really put these experiences on the same level as those experienced by the mystics of traditional religions?
The two types of experiences may not be so contradictory as you think. American essayist Timothy Leary (1920-1996) considered that psychotropic drugs were shortcuts towards a spiritual experience similar to those of historical mystics. These two forms of experience were then locked in different cultural contexts. For many people, the experimentation of these drugs is only a step having opened a world to them.
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