A few years ago, during a transformational period in my life, I went from certain atheism and nihilism to understanding that there was much more significance to spiritual dimensions of existence than I had realized. This broke a load-bearing block in my construction of what the world was and what it meant to me, so a lot of work was in order. I was presented with a rapid-fire succession of new ideas to engage with and sort through from the ground up. Suddenly I was soaking up information about topics like astrology, sacred geometry, theosophy, gnosticism, and so forth, and seriously questioning and reshaping how it all fit into my new understanding of the world.

Around this time I made a Tiktok account, and my mental model was even more efficiently restructured as I tested it against waves of online discourse. I was 15 years into academia, and even though social media discourse can be anti-intellectual and bullying and bot-filled and everything else it’s accused of, it was also fascinating to observe how public opinion weighed my thinking, in the way that a mad scientist observes the outcome of his so-crazy-it-just-might-work experiment.

A few weeks or months into this foray, my Tiktok feed shot me a woman who made content that villainized the practice of manifestation. Broadly speaking, manifestation is the application of belief and focused intention to help bring certain circumstances into your life. I was already thinking and engaging critically around the ways manifestation could become whitewashed (especially through a largely Western wellness and influencer framing), hyper-individualistic (especially when personal consciousness is treated as wholly responsible for a person's material circumstances), or disconnected from the traditions and systems of thought it drew and appropriated from (New Thought developed in active exchange with a school of Hindu philosophy called Vedanta, for example, and also absorbed aspects of Buddhism), so the content was at first inconspicuous in my feed.

On the surface, this woman signaled that her judgment could be trusted. She spoke in the vocabulary of progressive critique, had a large audience and swaths of thankful and supportive comments behind her, and positioned herself as someone authoritatively deconstructing and exposing the harm in a spiritual practice I was still wrapping my head around. Nonetheless, something in my gut reacted with an immediate and strong sense that this was wrong. The intuition came before the reasoning.

Intuition can initiate inquiry without settling it. In this case though, as I learned more, my feeling was validated. This woman had in the first place approached manifestation in a controlling way, trying to make other people behave the way she wanted so that she could dominate and use them. When her own practice hurt her, instead of reflecting on her own role, she turned outward and insisted that manifestation, and anyone who still practiced it, was delusional and harmful. She drew from real critiques, but used those critiques to flatten the entire thing into something inherently morally suspect, including dimensions of it she had never meaningfully engaged with herself.

A key point in this story is the way this woman used progressive language to make her own judgment feel politically and morally compulsory. Her argument carried an implicit warning that continuing to take manifestation seriously at all meant stepping outside the bounds of what a good, informed person was supposed to believe.

But there’s always been that thing in my gut, which I’m very thankful for, pointing me in the needed direction in life, when I’ve known myself enough to listen to it. It reminded me in no uncertain terms that outsourcing my opinions and my ability to stand behind them was not an option.

Holding onto our own judgment can come at a cost. In this case, openly refusing to accept someone else’s moral certainty brought plenty of social consequences with it. That kind of pressure can be difficult to withstand, whether you voice your disagreement or not. Yet, there is no single reliable authority standing outside the mess of the world who can tell us what is true, and the more fractured our informational landscape becomes, the more dangerous it becomes to place that responsibility entirely somewhere outside ourselves.

... the more fractured our informational landscape becomes, the more dangerous it becomes to place that responsibility entirely somewhere outside ourselves.

This does not mean treating our own judgment as infallible; it means locating our judgment in ourselves, and practicing discernment as something living and revisable, being willing to change our minds when experience gives us a real reason to. I want to look first at what that means more broadly, and then turn to some of the specific tools I have come to rely on in my own practice.

Where does judgment live?

In the opening of my article about woo-woo, I said that while I was writing to challenge dismissals of woo-woo rooted in unexamined assumptions around power and history, I was not claiming that every mystical belief is automatically true or harmless. But if we can’t fall back on automatic dismissal or acceptance, is there any safe direction to fall?

This is a classic anxiety about subjectivity more broadly: if everything is subjective, is anything even meaningful or true? Where is the solid ground?

Maybe we don’t need solid ground in order to have a living relationship with the truth. Maybe it’s more like floating in the ocean, flowing with the shape of the waves, ducking under them as they crest so they don’t crash into you, swimming against the current to stay oriented to your spot on the beach, but sometimes letting the current take you a bit farther down the shore, or out into deeper waters.

Encounters with reality continually reshape what we believe. At the same time, what we believe affects how we perceive and interpret what happens to us. So, belief and spirituality are always in contact with experience, and beg for a living relationship. My own experience has taught me that a lynchpin for navigating this kind of relationship is discernment.

Allowing your judgment to be situated within yourself does not make it random. People can develop better or worse judgment, and discernment is part of how that happens. You can be open to an idea without immediately adopting it. You can take something seriously enough to understand it and still decide that it does not hold up.

Experience matters, because discernment develops through repeated encounters with ideas, people, consequences, and our own mistakes in judgment. Self-knowledge also matters, because ego, fear, shame, intuition, and desire all participate in perception. Discernment is an ongoing process of assessment. It can become more practiced and more precise over time, while remaining open to revision.

In some contemporary progressive spaces, there is a particular anxiety around letting the wrong ideas in. Often, people in these spaces respond to these ideas with immediate policing, with the implication that engaging too openly with an idea risks pulling people inescapably down its ideological gravity well.

Often, people in these spaces respond to these ideas with immediate policing, with the implication that engaging too openly with an idea risks pulling people inescapably down its ideological gravity well.

Sometimes that caution is warranted. There are ideas that are presented in bad faith, and there are people whose goal in a conversation is to dominate rather than participate in it. But I also think this protective instinct can turn into a kind of purity culture (part of a lingering structure of Christian purity thinking that permeates a large part of American culture, even in spaces that understand themselves as thoroughly secular), where maintaining the moral integrity of a community means policing which ideas can be encountered.

Part of that impulse can come from a fear that exposure itself might contaminate us, or that entertaining a wrong idea for too long is inherently a moral failure. Underneath that can also be a lack of trust in our own capacity for discernment. If I do not trust myself to encounter a bad idea without absorbing it, then keeping the idea away entirely feels like the safest option.

This is also where moral deference can come into play. If the progressive community around me has already decided which ideas are acceptable to encounter and which ones are morally out of bounds, then I can simply defer to that judgment. The community becomes the place where the moral sorting happens.

One reason I find Grokkist interesting is that it tries to begin somewhere different, even radical, by centering curiosity and care. Instead of shutting it down at all costs, a community centering curiosity and care may first respond to an unfamiliar or uncomfortable idea with some version of, “tell me more,” followed by genuinely listening.

The aim is to understand what someone actually means before deciding what to make of it. That can feel inherently dangerous if openness is understood as acceptance, or if giving an idea attention is assumed to mean giving it equal weight—but I trust that I can listen closely, understand what someone is saying or trying to say, and then use my own judgment to decide whether an idea has merit or should be rejected.

... I trust that I can listen closely, understand what someone is saying or trying to say, and then use my own judgment to decide whether an idea has merit or should be rejected.

The same basic process shapes how I approach spirituality. I do not need every unfamiliar claim to pass an external test before I allow myself to consider it, and I also do not at all need to let every claim into my understanding of the world. I can stay curious long enough to see what an idea is doing, what biases are shaping it, how it relates to what I already know, and whether there is reason to keep it. And, I can stay caring enough to hold the person behind the idea—even in situations where they may not themselves have said everything perfectly right, or may be ignorant, or may even (sin of all sins) simply disagree with me.

Tools for spiritual discernment

Over time, I have developed some considerations that I think make for a good approach to spirituality. Some of them come from broader principles I feel strongly about, and some are wisdom I have picked up through experience. They do not apply identically to every person or every situation. I am also not presenting them as a rulebook. I am presenting them because I trust my judgment and intuition, and because I think they are helpful tools for approaching the field of all possible beliefs with both openness and discernment.

1. Understanding power

The first major consideration that has helped me orient myself is attention to power dynamics. My habit of noticing and naming power, as a practice of unpacking and (where possible) counterbalancing its consequences, is commonly attacked and dismissed by people across the spectrum of spiritual belief and ideology. I consider this to be a symptom of just how deeply society has ingrained into us the impulse to avoid facing and dealing with the uncomfortable realities of power at all costs. For example, spiritual and religious people often take the position that their realm is beyond identity, and from there conclude that identity does not matter, labels are part of some irrelevant dimension, and considering axes of oppression such as class, race, gender, ability, or sexuality can only be distracting and divisive.

People certainly exist beyond labels. Labels are all but useless in the private sphere (in line with Hannah Arendt’s writings on private, public, and social spheres). In some sense, it’s absolutely true that they are an illusion, that identity is an illusion. We are animated by an energy that is not fully containable in language, and in many contexts we can feel and understand and love each other without needing to categorize.

At the same time, labels exist for the purpose of strategic legibility, specifically because power dynamics are real and consequential. The whole framework of intersectional identity was proposed by a lawyer, Kimberlé Crenshaw, as a strategic response to situations where people faced legal discrimination specifically because they were located along multiple axes of oppression (i.e. being both Black AND women), and were therefore literally invisible to the law and legal protections of their rights. Identity labels have been cast as everything from attention seeking, to reductionist, to limiting, to socially controlling, to victimhood mentality, and they can certainly be misused in these ways, but they are also a tool for navigating and surviving a culture that works to strip people (across all axes) of their humanity at every turn.

So, when a spiritual framework handwaves away the role that power and oppression play in mundane reality, I am skeptical of whether it is actually moving beyond those dynamics or simply leaving them unexamined. Spiritual bypassing is what happens when people try to skip the wound because the wound is uncomfortable. It’s tempting to bask in the idea of oneness without acknowledging that there was ever a fracture, but we move beyond labels by moving through them.

It’s tempting to bask in the idea of oneness without acknowledging that there was ever a fracture, but we move beyond labels by moving through them.

Race and class and gender may not be “real” in an ultimate metaphysical sense, but they matter in a legal, social, embodied, public sense. Intersectionality matters because it names existing imbalances. It does not create imbalances. Avoiding the discomfort only delays having to sit with it.

Intersectionality has been diluted and filtered through pop culture to the point that it is often misused and misunderstood, used to play “oppression olympics,” or even is sometimes subsumed back into power games in a way that reinforces power structures rather than subverting them, like with online cancellations designed to satisfy some weird level of accelerationist black-and-white bloodlust.

But intersectionality is most importantly a move toward legibility. Acting like it simply doesn’t exist is not ameliorating the harm or pain. It’s just ignoring the language people have developed to process their experiences and be seen and validated and treated with humanity.

This is why attention to power matters in my discernment. Power shapes the conditions of access to knowledge. Intersectionality supplies a conceptual vocabulary that makes relational patterns of power cognitively legible. A conceptual vocabulary draws something into sufficient resolution that you can notice it consistently, and process it.

2. Understanding context

Another major part of my own spiritual discernment is understanding context. Spiritual traditions do not exist in a vacuum, and exploring them often means encountering practices that belong to particular communities and histories. Some of those practices are considered closed, meaning that access to them is rooted in particular relationships or lineages.

Closed practices are a particularly concrete case study on the importance of context. If you are drawn to a particular practice or belief or figure—say, Baron Samedi, whom you might encounter in popular culture as the dark, charismatic, top-hatted figure associated with death and cemeteries—it is easy to feel called toward the aesthetic and decide that you want to work with him in your own spiritual practice. Maybe you even experience signs that you interpret as his invitation.

But this is where I think it is worth stepping back to reflect. The question is not about whether some external authority has declared that you are or are not “allowed” to work with Baron Samedi. He is a lwa within Haitian Vodou, a living religious tradition formed among enslaved Africans and their descendants under conditions of colonial violence and religious repression. The tradition involves initiatory and lineage-based practices that are not offered to outsiders and has been preserved through generations of people whose belief system was actively suppressed and demonized. That history is part of the context of the figure. The appealing skulls and graveyards are not separable from the people who have carried the spiritual world they belong to.

And if I am taking the spiritual premise seriously in the first place, that context becomes even harder to ignore. If Baron Samedi is a real spiritual being with agency, rather than an aesthetic object or an archetype that I am entitled to use however I want, then why would I assume that his power is simply available to me? The people whose tradition has sustained a relationship with him are still living with the consequences of the violence, repression, and caricature surrounding that tradition. And here I am, perhaps with no relationship to or knowledge of that history at all, asking one of its spiritual figures to lend his power to my own ends. If you were him, would you help that person?

In my opinion, building a solid personal spiritual practice has to move beyond the isolated issue of whether something resonates and into broader issues of history and context. I avoid assuming spiritual access without considering relationship and responsibility, and asking whose reality I might be ignoring in order to make my own access feel uncomplicated.

I avoid assuming spiritual access without considering relationship and responsibility, and asking whose reality I might be ignoring in order to make my own access feel uncomplicated.

At the same time, not every spiritual relationship can or should be reduced to a rulebook. There are things that happen privately and sincerely between a person and whatever they understand as divine, ancestral, spiritual, or sacred. I do not have the authority to stand outside someone else’s private spiritual life and declare exactly what is or is not happening there. Sometimes a relationship develops in ways that do not fit neatly into the categories available from the outside, and humility helps in all directions.

Regardless, context changes what an action means. There is a difference between privately finding yourself in a sincere spiritual relationship, and publicly claiming a tradition as yours, selling it, teaching it casually, or stripping it for parts because you like the aesthetic. The latter moves involve a degree of hubris that matters materially, and it makes sense to take seriously the possibility that hubris matters spiritually too.

The same need for context becomes especially important when esoteric ideas start brushing up against motivations like fascism and racism. There is meaningful and powerful knowledge packed into esoteric and hermetic traditions, as well as ancient, Indigenous, and non-Western ones. I have no interest in throwing it all away because some of it has been corrupted. At the same time, all of this knowledge has a long history of being appropriated and distorted by people who wanted to use it toward political ends.

You can see this in spiritual narratives about special origins or bloodlines (think divine right of kings), and in blue/light eyes as a marker of healers and starseeds and psychics. You can also see it in the occult fascinations that became entangled with Nazi ideology, thanks to figures like Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, and Wilhelm Landig, and in contemporary ideas that overlap with things like Great Replacement theory and the cycle of ages. Context changes the thing.

That creates two very tempting responses. Some people enter these spaces without enough historical awareness and follow the ideas wherever they lead, which is one way people end up sliding into ideological snares without noticing what is happening. Other people see those snares and decide the whole body of knowledge must therefore be poisoned.

The harder path is to stay with the discomfort long enough to sort through both. That means taking history seriously and being willing to learn where an idea has been distorted. It also means being willing to face the parts of yourself that make certain distortions appealing.

Be willing to discover that something you found meaningful has ugly baggage attached to it, and then keep going instead of collapsing into either defensiveness or rejection. Be willing to make mistakes and revise your understanding as you learn more. Sometimes that means letting go of an idea entirely. Sometimes it means digging underneath the political misuse and finding that there is still something profound there once the distortion has been stripped away.

3. Understanding health

A third core aspect of my spiritual discernment is asking whether something is oriented toward health. I mean health holistically: mental and physical health matter, as well as community and ecological health. Considerations around health are also complicated by the understanding that someone can be experiencing a mental health issue and having a meaningful spiritual experience at the same time. This is another case where flattening the question into a binary creates more problems than it solves.

On one side, diagnosis is socially constructed in meaningful ways. Mental health categories emerge from systems that have their own ideas about what is normal and functional. Often people are understood as disordered because they cannot comfortably adapt to conditions built around worker productivity or social compliance, even when those conditions themselves may be unhealthy. Psychiatry and modern healthcare are therefore also things I approach with discernment. A diagnostic category, much like any other identity label, can offer useful language and even lifesaving support without becoming an unquestionable description of what a person fundamentally is.

On the other side, mental health crises can be very real and dangerous. It is easy to use spiritual language to reframe mania as awakening, or narcissistic inflation as chosenness. I have seen and experienced enough of this to take it seriously. I know what psychosis looks like. I know what it looks like when a cruel, controlling, manipulative person starts a cult. I’ve watched the catastrophic consequences play out. I know how easily spiritual language can give people an elaborate framework for spiraling farther away from reality instead of helping them come back into relationship with it.

During that first major shift in consciousness I described at the beginning of this writing, there was a moment where I did brush up against what could have spiralled into mania. I felt like I was surging with power, noticing the signs, everything seemed apocalyptically consequential. I knew I needed counsel from someone I could trust, so I called my close friend Steven, who I knew had been studying yoga for years and had gone through something called a Kundalini awakening. I felt like he would have helpful advice.

He told me to eat root vegetables, and to find a nice rock and keep it in my pocket. To step barefoot into the grass. To hydrate. To remember I’m part of a long history of people who have shared similar experiences, that we are all playing our part even when it feels like we are the only one carrying the entire world up with us.

Another potential danger in the spiritual realm is sliding from connection into solipsism. The realization that everything is connected can mutate into the conviction that I specifically am the center of that connection, uniquely awake in a world full of people who matter less.

This is why language about breaking out of the matrix, or other people being NPCs, throws up red flags for me. There may be useful metaphors in that language about becoming conscious of social conditioning or seeing systems that were invisible before, but other people should not have to become less real in order for my own awakening to feel more significant.

There is also a political danger here that connects directly back to the hierarchical spiritual systems mentioned in the previous section. The fantasy of being specially awakened becomes more dangerous when it merges with ideas about racial purity and contempt for the othered and supposedly unconscious masses.

The more secure we become in our worth, the less anxiety we have about our own status, the less the people around us have to be reduced in order to feel expansive. So, discernment is not only research or knowing the history. It is also the willingness to face yourself, and to love yourself.

... the less anxiety we have about our own status, the less the people around us have to be reduced in order to feel expansive.

This is where shadow work becomes important to what I consider a healthy spiritual practice. Shadow work asks you to face the parts of yourself you are used to shoving down because they feel shameful. Those parts do not disappear because you refuse to look at them; they keep acting, often from somewhere outside your conscious awareness. But when you bring them into the light and process them, they can become your greatest gifts.

Shadow work helps with discernment because it teaches us to recognize the difference between intuition and ego. Intuition can guide us in a healthy direction even when we cannot fully recognize or articulate why. Ego often guides us toward what protects our self-image, feeds our specialness, avoids shame, or permits us to bypass discomfort. At first, they can feel similar. An unchecked ego can impersonate intuition. Both can feel intense, and both can feel like knowing. They become easier to tell apart when we face ourselves honestly.

At the same time, ego is far from something we need to excise in pursuit of some kind of spiritual purity. Ego gives us a sense of self. It preserves continuity and allows us to have desires and boundaries. A healthy person has an ego. At the same time, that ego is not the sole organizing principle through which everything else gets interpreted (a Buddhist might even say that suffering arises when ego becomes something we identify with completely). The point of learning to recognize ego, then, is to recognize what it is doing and when it is exerting too much influence, rather than to eliminate it.

A healthy body does not eliminate inflammation or stress responses. Those processes have functions, and they become pathological when they are chronically activated or begin to dominate the whole system. Ego can be understood similarly. Protecting our self-image or wanting recognition sometimes serves us. Holistic health looks like an ego that participates without monopolizing, and discernment depends partly on learning its place in your overall field of perception and judgment.

Growing discernment

Discernment is less about finding a position from which uncertainty disappears than learning how to stay oriented while moving through it. The considerations I’ve described here are ways of doing that. Power, context, and health can also interact and conflict, and different perspectives and experiences can be real without necessarily fitting into one totalizing account. Discernment often means holding several pieces of evidence in tension instead of reaching a final answer, and staying with the discomfort rather than collapsing into either defensiveness or wholesale rejection.

Reality is relational, plural, unfinished, encountered from inside itself. We can find a way through it without outsourcing our judgment. At the same time, locating judgment in yourself creates a responsibility to develop the self that is doing the judging. A person capable of good judgment stays in living relationship with reality, curious enough to keep learning and fluid enough to change course at the right moment. This person’s judgment in turn affects their relationship with reality, and over time that relationship changes both what they are capable of perceiving and, I believe, what they help bring into being.