Reviving Spiritual Practice Without Turning It Into a Tool for Survival

Any serious attempt to revive transformative religious practice in response to civilizational crisis encounters a structural paradox. The practices most needed — contemplative attunement, embodied interoception, participatory knowing, the full ecology of ritual transformation — are intrinsically non-instrumental. They operate precisely by dissolving the means-ends rationality and propositional goal-orientation that dominate modern cognition. Yet the moment these practices are pursued in order to address the crisis, that instrumental framing reintroduces the very cognitive structure they exist to overcome. The practice is hollowed out from within.

The opposite failure is equally devastating. To pursue these practices in withdrawal from what might be called domicide — a comprehensive ontological collapse exceeding even the Bronze Age or Hellenistic catastrophes in scope — is to betray religion at a level deeper than doctrine. It reduces transformative practice to spiritual escapism while the conditions for human dwelling are systematically destroyed. Two failures thus operate simultaneously: instrumentalism, which kills the practice by conscripting it, and quietism, which renders it irrelevant to the defining emergency of our epoch.

The resolution, to the extent one exists, follows the logic of wu wei — the Taoist principle of effortless action, or trying not to try. Practices must be pursued for their own sake, because intrinsic engagement is the only condition under which they genuinely transform. Yet that very transformation — the reorientation of attention, desire, and relational capacity — is what makes practitioners capable of responding to domicide. The side effect must never collapse back into the instrumental frame. This paradox is not a problem to be solved but a meta-task: the central challenge for any serious revisioning of religion adequate to our historical moment.