Has secular spirituality emerged as an answer to a very real problem? Many people feel disconnected from community, culture, the environment, religion, and even from inner self. In societies shaped by individualism, consumption, and alienation, people are searching for meaning wherever they can find it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that search.
People should be free to explore meditation, philosophy, ritual, contemplative practice, altered states, or different ways of understanding consciousness. Cross-cultural exchange can be deeply meaningful. Learning directly from traditions outside our own can change how we understand ourselves in the world.
The problem begins when exchange turns into extraction. Decolonial scholars have been warning about this problem for decades. Linda Tuhiwai Smith has shown how research itself became entangled with colonial power, allowing Western institutions not merely to study other peoples but to classify, reinterpret, and control knowledge about them (Smith, 2021). Aníbal Quijano described a related problem as the coloniality of power. Colonial rule may formally end while hierarchies surrounding race, knowledge, culture, and authority continue operating (Quijano, 2000). Walter Mignolo similarly argues that Western modernity has treated its own categories of knowledge as universal while reducing other systems of thought to folklore, superstition,culture, religion, or belief (Mignolo, 2009).
That history matters when we talk about spirituality. The question I am asking is simple and something many decolonial scholars have been asking in institutions. I’m simply applying the question to secular spirituality. When Western institutions and spiritual entrepreneurs take practices from other cultures, remove the worldview that gave those practices meaning, translate them into Western psychological language, and then present the revised version as more rational than the original, have we really escaped the old hierarchy or have we simply given it a new language? T
This is not an argument against psychology, science, feminism, secularism, or cultural exchange. It is an argument about power. Who gets to interpret knowledge? Who gets cited? Who gets published? Who receives research funding? Who becomes the expert? Who gets paid? And whose worldview is still dismissed as superstition, irrationality, or pathology?
The Meaning Crisis
The so-called crisis of meaning is often discussed as though it were primarily an individual psychological problem. But meaning is not created in isolation. It develops through community, culture, relationships, philosophy, history, and the stories people use to understand their place in the world.
I personally see secular spirituality as a very understandable response to a society that has become disconnected from the environment, community, ritual, and the inner life. People are trying to free themselves from the shackles of alienation, exploitation, endless consumption, and a way of living that often reduces human beings to productivity machines.
Is secular spirituality an antidote to that system, or is it reproducing the very system it is trying to escape?
New Age spirituality and secular spirituality appear radically different on the surface, but they can reproduce surprisingly similar patterns.
New Age spirituality often borrows practices while retaining or expanding metaphysical claims. It may combine ideas from Hinduism, Buddhism, Indigenous traditions, Western occultism, psychology, personal revelation, and other systems into a new spiritual narrative.
Secular spirituality usually takes another route.
Instead of expanding the metaphysics, it removes them. Meditation becomes attention training. My mystical experience becomes an “awe moment.” Ritual becomes a psychological intervention. Spiritual practice becomes nervous-system regulation. Thousands of years of philosophy can be translated and flattened into a therapeutic tool for stress productivity, or personal meaning making.
In that process, the original metaphysics may disappear while naturalist or physicalist assumptions quietly take their place. One approach can romanticize and remix traditions.The other can rationalize and secularize them.
Both can alter the original knowledge system.
They simply do it in opposite directions.
The Authority of Science
One reason secular spirituality may look more rational than New Age spirituality is that it borrows the language and authority of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and scientific institutions. Those institutions carry enormous cultural authority.
So when spiritual practices are translated into psychological or neuroscientific language, the translation can appear neutral even when it contains philosophical and cultural assumptions of its own. But psychology itself has been arguing about this for decades.
Psychologist Kwang-Kuo Hwang directly criticized what he called a “Kantian Eurocentric bias” within cross-cultural psychology. His argument was that psychologists can misunderstand other cultures when they force non-Western concepts into Western categories and then treat those categories as though they were universal descriptions of humanity (Hwang, 2020).
This is not some fringe complaint coming from people who hate psychology.
It is a dispute taking place inside psychology itself.The problem becomes even more obvious when we consider who psychology historically studied. Much of psychological science was built disproportionately from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations. The now famous WEIRD problem.
So here is the obvious question:
If psychology itself is still debating whether some of its theories have mistaken Western cultural assumptions for universal human truths, why should translating another culture's spirituality into Western psychological terminology automatically make it more neutral?
It doesn't. Sometimes it simply replaces one worldview with another and gives the second worldview a lab coat and institutional authority of white governance.
Psychology Is Beginning to Admit This
Psychology's own institutions are increasingly acknowledging this problem.In August 2025, the American Psychological Association adopted a policy statement calling for greater parity between traditional knowledge from nondominant worldviews and dominant psychological paradigms.
The statement is direct.
The APA acknowledges that psychological science historically failed to adequately recognize traditional wisdom and describes the assumption that dominant scientific methods and interpretations are superior to Indigenous knowledge as a form of “epistemological violence.”
It further states that traditional knowledge has not historically been given equal power and weight compared with mainstream epistemologies and calls for changes to psychological research, funding, accreditation, publication, and training (American Psychological Association, 2025).
That matters.It means institutional authority should never be confused with neutrality. Psychology can produce extraordinarily valuable knowledge while still carrying cultural, philosophical, institutional, and historical assumptions. Those two things can be true at the same time.
Fanon Already Warned Us
Frantz Fanon understood this problem decades ago. Fanon was not criticizing mental health institutions from the outside. He was a psychiatrist. His clinical and political work challenged the idea that psychological suffering could always be understood by isolating pathology inside an individual while ignoring colonialism, racism, violence, humiliation, and social domination.
For Fanon, psychic alienation and political alienation could not simply be pulled apart. Later scholarship examining his psychiatric work shows that Fanon's approach challenged the transplantation of European psychiatric assumptions into colonial North Africa without examining the cultural and political world surrounding the patient (Robcis, 2020).
This is why decolonizing mental health means more than adding diverse people to an institution and continuing business as usual.It means questioning the institution's assumptions about normality itself. Who defined the healthy person? Who defined rationality? Who defined delusion?Who defined religion? Who defined superstition? Whose worldview was sitting invisibly behind those definitions? Fanon's work makes an uncomfortable point clear. An institution can believe it is treating people objectively while still operating inside a larger system of domination.
Epistemological Asymmetry
I am not arguing that people should stop studying Advaita Vedānta, Buddhism, yoga, meditation, Indigenous philosophy, ritual, animism, or anything else. Quite the opposite. Cross-cultural learning should be celebrated.
The problem is epistemological asymmetry.This occurs when knowledge moves in only one direction. A Western author takes a concept from another tradition, translates to secular psychology for a Western audience, publishes books about it, sells courses about it, becomes recognized as an authority on it, and gains institutional credibility from it. Meanwhile, the worldview that produced the knowledge is still treated as less rational. That is the contradiction.The practice is useful.The people who developed it are irrational. The meditation is evidence based.The metaphysics surrounding it are nonsense.The ritual has therapeutic value. The worldview that gave it meaning is superstition. Apparently the knowledge becomes respectable somewhere over the Atlantic.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith's work is extremely useful here because she shows that colonial extraction was never only about land and physical resources. This was discussed in her book,” Decolonizing Methodologies”. Knowledge itself could be collected, categorized, translated, institutionalized, and returned to colonized peoples through Western systems of authority (Smith, 2021).
Mignolo describes a related challenge as epistemic disobedience. As refusing the assumption that one intellectual tradition possesses the neutral vocabulary through which everybody else's reality must be translated (Mignolo, 2009). That is exactly the hierarchy I am questioning.
Cultural Erasure
Why does this matter? Because cultural erasure does not always mean that the practice disappears. Sometimes the practice survives beautifully. It is the people who disappear from the story.The meditation remains.The philosophy disappears.The yoga remains. The worldview disappears.The psychedelic remains. The community disappears.The ritual remains. The cosmology disappears.Eventually Western institutions, researchers, authors, and influencers can become recognized as the authorities on practices that were previously dismissed as irrational when practiced within their original communities.
That affects more than symbolic recognition. It affects citations. Hiring. Publishing contracts. Research funding. University positions.Media visibility.Intellectual property. And who gets invited into the room as the expert. Decolonization is therefore not merely about politely acknowledging where an idea came from. It is about redistributing epistemic authority.
When Translation Becomes Replacement
Translation itself is not the problem. Every culture translates ideas. Every tradition changes.Every philosophy develops. Cross-cultural exchange has always existed.The problem begins when translation becomes replacement.If Advaita Vedānta is translated completely through secular psychology, psychology can gradually become the authority that tells the public what Advaita was “really” saying. At that point, the original tradition no longer gets to explain itself. Western psychology explains it for them. We see versions of this constantly online. Yoga becomes stretching. Meditation becomes brain rewiring.Mysticism becomes nervous-system regulation. Contemplative practice becomes “tools for awe.”
And frankly, if somebody walks into a sacred tradition as a guest and reduces thousands of years of philosophy to a therapeutic mind hack called “meaning making” or “Tools for Awe Moments,” somebody may reasonably tell them to take their existential-crisis, Eat, Pray, Love ass the fuck out of the sacred space.
You may be about to experience awe.
But it’s not the brain transcending .
It might be the foot of the pandit whose tradition you just flattened into a $299 online course wrapped in psychological jargon.
Humor aside, the issue is serious enough that many teachers refuse to teach western people. Who can blame them?
A tradition should not have to become recognizable to Western psychology before it is allowed to count as knowledge. This is why decolonizing epistemology is important. In many epistemologies, experience is not something waiting to be validated by outside evidence. To force that knowledge through the standards of another epistemology in order to make it” legitimate” is to change the rules by which that knowledge was originally understood. It was not designed to answer to a different system of proof.
The Danger of Removing Context
There can also be practical consequences to stripping practices from their contexts. Meditation is not universally benign.Research has documented meditation-related experiences involving anxiety, fear, changes in perception, disturbances in sense of self, cognitive changes, and other difficult experiences.That does not prove meditation is dangerous.It proves that contemplative practice is considerably more complicated than the secular narrative sometimes suggests.
Traditional contemplative systems often situated practices inside larger structures involving ethics, community, teachers, philosophical interpretation, expectations about unusual experiences, and guidance about what to do when difficult states emerged.If the practice is removed while everything surrounding it is dismissed as unnecessary religious baggage, we should at least ask whether something useful was thrown away. An experience that makes sense inside one epistemology may appear pathological when interpreted entirely through another. Sometimes what looks like “unnecessary tradition” to the outsider was part of the safety system.
Psychedelics and Ayahuasca
The same question appears in psychedelic culture. Ayahuasca and other psychedelic practices did not historically exist merely as isolated chemicals waiting to become mental health hacks. Their use developed within cultural systems involving preparation, community, specialists, interpretation, ritual, relationships, and expectations about what experiences meant. This does not mean traditional practices are automatically safe. It does not mean Indigenous practitioners possess magical immunity from abuse, exploitation, or error. And it certainly does not mean modern medicine has nothing useful to contribute.
The point is much simpler.
If outsiders extract the substance while treating the surrounding knowledge system as disposable, they should not assume that everything discarded was meaningless. Some traditions contain practical knowledge because communities have spent generations learning how to work with difficult experiences. Decolonization does not require romanticizing tradition.It requires enough humility to admit that modern institutions may not already know everything worth knowing.
Science Writing Checks It Can't Cash
Then we get to the metaphysical problem. This is where science starts writing checks it can’t cash. I watch debates about consciousness and scroll through social media, and there is always someone who gets on and has to identify themselves. “I am a neuroscientist.” “I’m a chemist.” “I am a physicist.” “I have a PhD.”
Great. Yeah, and?
What’s your point? Are you a philosopher who is going to ask questions that expand my understanding of consciousness, or are you a scientist using scientism to insert authority into an area where science has no jurisdiction? That’s all I care about.
Credentials matter when someone is speaking within their area of expertise. They do not magically turn an unresolved philosophical question into a solved empirical problem.
Psychology and neuroscience can study neural processes associated with conscious experiences. They can identify mechanisms, manipulate brain states, study correlations, and develop increasingly sophisticated scientific theories of consciousness. What they cannot do, merely by observing a neural correlate, is jump from “this experience is associated with activity in the brain” to “therefore, the brain is the sole ontological source of consciousness.”
That second statement requires additional philosophical assumptions. Neural correlation does not, by itself, establish ontological causation. Anybody who gives you some lame Phineas Gage story like they just solved the hard problem of consciousness is mistaking you for a sucker who doesn’t understand the central question.
“Supernatural” According to Whom?
The word supernatural creates another problem. Animism, idealism, panpsychism, dual-aspect monism, physicalism, and other metaphysical systems are different attempts to describe reality and the relationship between mind and matter. Calling every alternative to physicalism “magic” or “supernatural” does not settle the philosophical argument. It avoids it.
The category of supernatural already assumes a boundary between what counts as natural and what supposedly exists outside nature. It is a philosophically loaded concept because, if something is happening, then in some sense it is obviously part of nature. That boundary is not culturally universal. It is historically, philosophically, and politically situated. Who drew that boundary, and under what philosophy?
Different cultures have not always divided mind, matter, ancestors, nature, consciousness, persons, and the environment in the same way Western modernity has. We need to notice when one culturally situated ontology has quietly become the referee judging all the others.
That does not prove animism. It does not disprove physicalism. It simply means physicalism should have to make its argument like everybody else. It does not get to win by declaring itself the default.
The Race to Innocence
There is another layer to this conversation, feminism. There is no denying that patriarchy exists across science, spirituality, philosophy, institutions, and religion. Women should absolutely challenge discrimination and male domination wherever they encounter it. But experiencing oppression within one hierarchy does not prevent somebody from occupying a position of power within another.
This matters when predominantly Western secular communities speak about the traditions of marginalized communities. Questions of white privilege, cultural authority, and epistemic power cannot simply disappear because the person speaking has also experienced sexism or another form of oppression. When Western practitioners interpret, criticize, or repackage traditions that come from marginalized communities, they should also examine the social and institutional power they bring into that relationship.
Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack called this dynamic the “race to innocence”: the tendency to foreground the structure in which we are subordinated while failing to confront structures in which we may occupy dominant positions (Fellows & Razack, 1998).
And feminism itself is not culturally neutral. Hindu women, Indigenous women, African feminists, Muslim feminists, Black feminists, postcolonial feminists, and countless others have developed sophisticated critiques of patriarchy within their own cultural and intellectual traditions. Center them.Cite them. Listen to them. Do not assume Western women have been appointed spokespersons for everybody else's liberation. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's famous question,”Can the Subaltern Speak?” remains relevant because supposedly benevolent institutions can speak for marginalized people so loudly that marginalized people themselves become difficult to hear (Spivak, 1988).
Moving Forward
I’am not interested in cancel culture. I believe in conversation, accountability, relationship building, making mistakes, learning, and doing better. I know I have made mistakes in my own journey. The goal is not purity or moral perfection. There is no pure human being standing outside history. The goal is awareness of power.
There are already psychologists, clinicians, Indigenous researchers, contemplative practitioners, philosophers, and members of traditional communities doing this work. Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls for research that serves Indigenous communities rather than merely turning them into objects of investigation. Fanon challenged psychiatry to recognize the political and cultural worlds surrounding psychological suffering. Mignolo challenges the assumption that Western epistemology possesses the universal vocabulary of knowledge. Hwang challenges psychology’s Eurocentric universalism from inside psychology itself. Fellows and Razack remind us that fighting one hierarchy does not absolve us from examining the hierarchies in which we hold power.
And now even the American Psychological Association has formally stated that traditional knowledge from nondominant worldviews should be treated with greater parity and that psychology must confront systems that suppress it.
So no, my criticism is not that secular spirituality is inherently bad. It is not. Nor am I arguing that every ancient belief should be preserved unchanged forever. Cultures evolve. Philosophies evolve. Science evolves. People are allowed to disagree with the traditions they study.
The problem begins when one worldview borrows from another, gains authority from what it borrowed, and then turns around and declares the original worldview irrational. That is not a neutral exchange. That is an epistemological hierarchy.
And when removing the original people, philosophy, metaphysics, or worldview makes the product easier to sell, publish, institutionalize, or market, there is an economic incentive to preserve that hierarchy.
Colonialism has always known how to turn somebody else’s resources into somebody else’s profit. Knowledge should not be exempt from that conversation.
So these are the questions I think we should be asking the authors, teachers, and influencers we follow in secular spirituality.
When you remove a tradition’s original metaphysics, how do you know your secular interpretation is more accurate rather than simply more familiar to a Western audience?
Which scholars, teachers, or practitioners from the originating tradition do you cite, platform, or financially support? How do they feel about the metaphysical shift or tossing out you have made?
Are you presenting your interpretation as one possible framework, or as what the tradition was “really” saying?
If you use psychology or neuroscience to legitimize a practice, how do you account for the fact that those fields are themselves debating Eurocentrism and claims of universality?
If you profit from teaching practices that came from another culture, how does authority, recognition, or financial value flow back to the communities that developed them?
What would count as evidence that your secular interpretation is actually a distortion of the tradition rather than a clarification of it?
If the originating tradition disagrees with your interpretation, why should your psychological framework outrank theirs?
Are you secularizing the practice because the evidence requires it, or because your audience is more comfortable with psychology than metaphysics?
And if the same practice was dismissed as irrational when taught by its original community but becomes respectable after being translated into neuroscience, what exactly changed? The evidence, or the authority of the person explaining it?
Those are not questions meant to shut down conversation. They are the conversation.
If secular spirituality genuinely wants to move beyond old religious hierarchies, then it should be willing to examine the new hierarchies it may be creating in their place.
References
American Psychological Association. (2025). APA policy statement on reconciling traditional wisdom and psychological science. American Psychological Association.
Barreto, M., et al. (2021). Loneliness around the world: Age, gender, and cultural differences in loneliness. Personality and Individual Differences, 169, 110066.
Costin, V., & Vignoles, V. L. (2023). Meaning is about mattering: Evaluating coherence, purpose, and existential mattering as precursors of meaning in life judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)
Fellows, M. L., & Razack, S. (1998). The race to innocence: Confronting hierarchical relations among women. Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 1, 335–352.
Helm, P. J., Rothschild, L. G., Greenberg, J., & Croft, A. (2020). Explaining sex differences in existential isolation research. Personality and Individual Differences.
Heu, L. C., van Zomeren, M., & Hansen, N. (2019). Lonely alone or lonely together? A cultural-psychological examination of individualism-collectivism and loneliness in five European countries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(5), 780–793.
Hwang, K.-K. (2020). Escape from Kantian Eurocentric bias in cross-cultural psychology. Culture & Psychology, 26(4), 927–947.
Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.
Robcis, C. (2020). Frantz Fanon, institutional psychotherapy, and the decolonization of psychiatry. Journal of the History of Ideas, 81(2), 303–325.
Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (3rd ed.). Zed Books.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.