Statesight: The USA's Homegrown Spirituality

Statesight is a spirituality unique to the United States, a richly diverse, hopeful, and kinetic lore we tend to dance to without fully realizing it. How might we benefit from becoming conscious of our rootedness in this state? How might this awaken a sense of belonging to a lineage shared by our spiritual kin?

Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD

July 2026

God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

—Emerson's journal

And afterward, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.
—Joel 2:28

At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

—Gloria Anzaldua

Listen to this as you read it:

Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

Or this:

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those. The first is from “The Poet,” the second from “Experience.” They feel very American. Not the content so much; Coleridge wrote well about that dream-power, and Rumi about the journey and finding wisdom. The bold style, though; the peppery tang, the loping onward, the inward but exuberant willfulness. What’s on the horizon? Maybe something better. Let’s go see. “I cannot be an optimist,” wrote Cornel West, “but I am a prisoner of hope.” We all are here, even the cynics among us.

In this land, a spirituality that includes but reaches farther than Christianity has grown like a tree for centuries. But most Americans aren’t aware of it. We perch on its branches, eating its nuts and building our nests without seeing the towering structure whole. If we did, our knowledge of this precious dappled legacy would give us back—we the restless and endlessly mobile—emotional foundations that bind us to the land and to each other, with abundant differences to delight in. We might live here more lightly, roaming within the space of a secure attachment. Celebrating our differences on common ground, we might tend a hope that the prospect of a free and fair USA is not spent, its Revolution yet to be finished.

We might even summon the strength to repair the Liberty Bell in our troubled hearts.

The tall, lush-leaved tree of American spirituality reaches too far and deep to examine here in detail. We will sample some of its elements below while tracing a root or two, a section of trunk, and a few branches.

First, though, we had better get clear on some key terms.

Strange Sympathies

“I feel the centipede in me--cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies...” This is Emerson again, from his journals.

Can there be a homegrown American spirituality? Of course, the indigenous people of this land have practiced their own perpetually deepening forms of it since long before Europeans colonized what is now the United States. But what about everything arrived here since then, including Christianity? Doesn’t it come from elsewhere?

Consider what in the West is known as the Japanese tea ceremony. This intricate and beautiful ritual began in the ninth century, when a Buddhist monk brought tea to Japan from China. Since then, the ceremony has evolved to incorporate elements of Shinto and an array of highly refined practices, especially from the sixteenth century forward. There are schools that train teamasters and teach the Way of Tea, each with its own nuances of interpretation, setting, and practice. Even seasonal timing comes into it.

In other words, Japan imported tea from China, with its own long tea traditions, and then made the practice of drinking tea its own. The Way of Tea is uniquely Japanese.

Fed from here and far abroad, Statesight is my term for a spirituality unique to the United States, with strange sympathies emanating into us from the land itself. Statesight is not a singular movement, tradition, church, or other religious organization or institution: rather, our variety of awakening functions as a loreway: a body of guiding stories and practices that serve as a worldview and bring a sense of enchantment to living.

Statesight is a loreway characterized by these twenty characteristics:

Indigenous roots that continue to grow and complexify;
Diasporic spiritual traditions and practices creatively adapted to US life;
Features of the natural world read like statements in a sacred text;
A bold, restless drive for ongoing spiritual experimentation;
A preference for experience over dogma or doctrine;
A preoccupation with symbol, image, and metaphor;
Heart-based gnosis that includes mind and ideas;
Celebratory embodiment, often with art, music, and dance;
Blissticism: visionary experiences for the common person;
Altered states and transformations of consciousness;
Strong interest in kinds of healing, personal and collective;
Openness to paranormal and transcendent experiences;
Authenticity and naturalness as a recurring theme;
Syncretic and ecclectic when religiously expressed;
Countercultural, edgy, marginal, and even heretical;
Emphasis on individual self-improvement and responsibility;
Abiding concern for being in service to social justice;
Appreciation of difference, plurality, and diversity;
Utopic imaginings toward founding good societies; and
Post-belief faith that life can be fuller, deeper, and richer.

I coined "blissticism" with Joseph Campbell in mind ("Follow your bliss") as well as the flow of visionary experiences alive and well here even among non-contemplatives. We don't always go to the deserts or mountains for revelations; sometimes they emerge spontaneously through a dance, a conversation, a TV show, a book, a salad eaten on the go. In Star Wars terms, I see it as a kind of democratization of the Force.

Gnosis started out as a nondescript Greek word for knowledge from investigation, but through time it has come to mean direct experience of the sacred, of the divine. It contrasts with theology, creed, belief, or other kinds of knowing about rather than knowing with. Moments of unitive connection, of nameless joy or depth, of intuitive comprehension, are moments of gnosis. Statesight is a path or way of gnosis infused thematically with the abundant diversity of terrains and microclimates pulsing between Pacific and Atlantic.

This kind of knowing or experiencing is often described as "spiritual but not religious," a phrasing that originated from Alcoholics Anonymous as inspired by the work of C. G. Jung and William James. The phrasing exudes an air of opposition, stubbornly flowing back past the manifold sects, cults, and religious offshoots which have characterized spirituality in the USA. A common distinction is that spirituality feels transcendent beyond our ken, whereas religion is a human invention. Collapsing the first into the second fails consistently to match the quality of the experience. But overemphasizing one smuggles in the other, as when New Age practitioners live what is functionally a religious life—creation stories, rituals, prayers, core beliefs, mythic worldview, sacred texts and music—but refuse to call it that.

In old age, Carl Jung was asked by interviewer John Freeman whether he believed in God. “Difficult to answer,” he said, looking back over a lifetime of dreams, imaginings, sacred tales, and synchronicities (coincidences that don’t feel random). “I don’t need to believe. I know.” That is gnosis. It is the sense of being invisibly guided, of felt participation in more-than-human mysteries. It is an intuitive flow rather than an object to be placed under a microscope. When you have this knowing (Jung often said), you don’t need belief.

Because gnosis is ineffable, even when overwhelming, its presence evaporates dogmatism. A favorite figure of atheist criticism, the maniac who kills six people “because God told me to,” is propelled by a compulsive literalism alien to gnosis. To assess the authenticity of gnosis from the outside, we consider its results: Do its possessors bring division and harm, or insight and humaneness? Unlike psychotic people, are small-g gnostics able to wonder about their visions, reflect on them, doubt themselves? By their fruits we shall know them.

"Gnosis" herein is therefore different from how Arthur Versluis uses the word in his book American Gnosis, where a woman's "awakening" leads her into becoming a Trumper. Even if we stick to capital-G Gnosticism, as Versluis tends to do in his comparative analyses, such an "awakening" would rather be a falling into the authoritarian power of the evil Demiurge and his band of archons: the very opposite of gnosis as a direct experience of sacred reality. Statesight has less to do with classical Gnosticism and more to do with small-g gnosis as a lived array of deepening perceptions informed by the presence of the land itself.

"Spirituality" in the Christian West was understood at first to be an aspect of religion when mentioned at all; separating them was an American move via Whitman and other nonconforming seekers (another transformed word) focused on the experience of whatever spirit meant to them. (William James would go even farther by rescuing "mysticism" from disparagement, as Margaret Fuller had tried to do. In the eighteenth century, "mystical theology" was the kind that went beyond the literal.)

"Spiritual" and "spirit" refer to breath, as their counterparts often do in many cultures. The usual mechanistic explanation, that our ancestors believed in spirit because it ceased with breath at life’s end, is backwards. They saw breath and wind as symbols of a vitality at large in the world, an invisible but tangible animation of all things, human or not. Jung, Shankara, Schopenhauer, Schrodinger, and many others agree that objective knowledge of the spirit is a contradiction in terms: we can’t pin spirit down or dissect its free-roving autonomy. As Emerson said, “A certain wandering light comes to me which I instantly perceive to be the Cause of Causes. It transcends all proving. It is itself the ground of being; and I see that it is not one & I another, but this is the life of my life.”

As the philosopher Simeon Mackenzie puts it in my novel Heartlander,

Breath, wind, the animation of the world, of a mood, even of a dream, symbolize or express a touch of spirit. In common usage, terms like “team spirit” or “human spirit” pick that up. Spirit as we feel it moves toward and through us as a subtle activation… Hermetics called it Big Mind; Chinese philosophers, the Tao…

For our purposes, “spirituality” can refer to our conscious engagement with the existential dimensions of life: Beauty, Meaning, Unity, what enlivens, what inspires, and other preoccupations of our higher human nature. Spirit is a power, a presence, an animation whose Source we sense but cannot see.

The Indigenous Roots and Trunk

Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them.

–Linda Hogan, Dwellings

The original inhabitants of the land now known as the United States of America lived in more than a thousand spacious societies and spoke in perhaps 500 languages. Today, their population is around nine million souls. Many but not all are members of 574 federally recognized tribes. There is not one “Native American” religion, there are hundreds, each with its own lore, pantheon, and worldview. (I tend to say “Indian” when not referring to specific tribes because a number of indigenous people here have told me they prefer that term.)

Even so, commonalities reach across tribes. One commonality is reverence for the natural world and its beings, including the land and the elements. Romanticizing this as a kind of all-knowing “pantheism” is a Western notion, as is splitting spirituality from nature and regarding nature as something separate from us. Ecospirituality is the default religion of humanity. Here, boundless ecological diversity found reflection in a diversity of faiths and practices that is itself a common theme.

Another is heart-based obligation to kindred. In the writings of American Indians enduring waves of massacre, disease, and displacement, all in a context of repeatedly broken treaties, a poignant observation repeats itself: shock at the settlers’ cold-heartedness, cruelty, and greed for land. Just how does one “own” the land? How would one “own” one’s grandmother?

Despite erasure and destruction, accounts survive. Lakota medicine man Black Elk’s is one of the better known. He was at Little Bighorn and at Wounded Knee. In The Sacred Pipe, he said, “Perhaps you have noticed that even in the slightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in different ways.” He said more about this worldview in Black Elk Speaks:

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.

No wall divides self and world, the individual and the society of beings both human and not. Everyone participates in the Great Conversation.

As he got older, Black Elk embraced Catholicism, which confuses those who see religion as exclusive. Indigenous religion is inclusive; it is no contradiction to place a figure of Jesus on an altar bearing other figures. By contrast, the Catholic Church now seeks to beatify Black Elk, thereby assimilating him. They took our land, remarks Linda Hogan (Chickasaw Nation): now they want our spirituality.

To say that the trunk of Statesight is both indigenous and ancient does not mean it is ownable, partial, obsolete, or incomplete. On its sturdy, ever-evolving base grew a new spiritual being—kindred, even family, but not more advanced or better—from which sprouted many complex layers of growth.

Black Spirituality

Black people arrived here before long slavery. A free Black man named Juan Garrido traveled with Spanish explorers in 1513—94 years before Jamestown, the first English settlement—into what is now Florida. He turned up later in California. In 1536, the Black Muslim Esteban led Spanish survivors over 15,000 miles through Texas on a journey almost twice the length of Lewis and Clark’s. Kidnapped from a stretch of West Africa between Senegal and Angola, the first Black slaves arrived in 1619, in Virginia, a year before Plymouth Colony was founded.

Garrido had been exposed to Christianity in Portugal and Spain, but in the Kingdom of Kongo (now Angola) where he was born around 1480, religious life revered ancestors, told sacred tales, sang, celebrated, and conducted complex animistic rituals, all in accord with the rhythms and seasons of the natural world. In their creation story, a spark of holy fire ignited in a vast void and gave rise to the cosmos, an image that has been compared to the Big Bang.

Even after Christianity came, religious life in the Kingdom remained syncretic, blending faiths instead of demanding exclusive membership. It is reasonable to assume that, like Black Elk, and like indigenous people the world over, Garrido held his faiths inclusively.

Although he was not a slave, he came to a land whose invaders would bring slavery to these shores in 1619 and go on to ship 388,000 here; many died in the terrible Middle Passage. The New World total who survived was 10.7 million. Colonial economies depended on their unpaid labor; slaves fought in the Revolutionary War, and slave labor built the White House. In fact, by the 1700s, slaves made up half the population of South Carolina, and a larger segment later; by 1770, slaves were a quarter of New York's population.

With these slaves—Akan, Bakongo, Bambara, Ibibio, Igbo, Mandinka, Ovimbundu—arrived West and Central African forms of spirituality, including lore, wisdom, magic, dance, medicine, ritual, and divination.

Although diverse, these African spiritualities had things in common: a fatherly but distant creator god (e.g., Olorun the Sky Ruler, Nyame the All-Seeing), intermediary deities or spirits like the Orishas in Yoruba religion, the power of ritual, spirit possession, herbal healing knowledge, charms and amulets, storytelling and oral tradition, embodied communal reverence and ecstasy through dance, drumming, and song, respect for ritual expertise, naming rituals, rites of passage, an animistic worldview, and ancestors as ever-present.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the figure of the Black priest or medicine man:

He early appeared on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappoint- ment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.

Ancient traditional blends of sacred practice and lore provided sturdy trellises on which Christian slaves grew their own varieties of Christianity—in the US, Protestant in particular—once exposed to it. Jesus, angels, and saints were interpreted as mediators of the distant Father, for example. African frameworks shaped Christian rituals like prayer and communion and survived instead of being erased. Praying for the dead preserved cultural continuity and ancestral ties that helped bind families fragmented by slavery. The new charms and amulets were Bibles, candles, and holy water; healers and diviners, some leading Hoodoo and Vodou rituals, preached and led prayer meetings. Some of the leaders and ritual experts were women.

As a response to the call of necessity, this creative syncretism translated Christianity, an alien otherworldly religion, into a source of strength for enduring unbearable realities, and by doing so birthed a new spirituality oriented on liberation, healing, ecstasy, and justice. The Promised Land had been moved from the next world into this one, awaiting entry. As Diana Hayes writes,

Despite the oppressive and ungodly forces applied against them, they forged a spirituality that encouraged hope and sustained faith, which enabled them to build communities of love and trust and to persevere in their persistent efforts to be the free men and women they had been created to be.

At first, slaves gathered in secret meetings organized at great risk by ritualists and community leaders. Eventually, their churches and the mutual aid societies run out of them provided spaces and services for religious practice, community resilience-building, tangible as well as spiritual support, first aid and nursing for the frequent beatings and whippings, food, shelter, education, networking, current information, and an ethic of care and responsibility. Members also heard and told stories about Moses and other biblical figures leading their people to freedom.

As time went on, these African American approaches to spirituality grew many branches. Two were the Black church, the first opening in Georgia in 1773, and sacred music in a variety of forms, including early slave spirituals. The church grew in importance as a base for resistance to slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression. Spirituals carried poignant expressions of grief and longing along with coded messages about escape opportunities and coming actions. Spirituals, call-and-response, ring shouts, and other expressions of sacred music led to musical offshoots like rhythm and blues, country music, gospel music, boogie-woogie, jazz, rockabilly, and rock 'n' roll as founded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and popularized by Chuck Berry.

A lesson for our time in all this is that communal spirituality can help people navigate times of massive and prolonged rupture. Such times require identity reconstruction and unprecedented resilience. Reinterpreting the traditional can illuminate the contemporary and fortify creative resilience.

Great Awakenings

For the most part, Christianity exerted little influence on slaves in North America until the 1730s, when the first Great Awakening flared across the colonies. Even then, it took more than a century, by the end of which Christianity itself had been converted, at least for people of color and for those who supported and advocated for them. Alternatives like Obeah, Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé spread everywhere, particularly where Catholicism had taken hold. Some of the slaves were Muslims.

Back in 1626, the Virginia General Court investigated acts of magic by Joan Wright, including predictions she had made about neighbors dying. Evidently, she had learned some magical practices in England. She was probably aquitted—the records are missing—but the case and many after it show the need to distinguish between two groups of women (a few men too, but mostly women) accused of arcane crimes: those open about their esoteric activities, and those singled out mainly for being economically successful, including widows who refused to remarry. The accused during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 included Dorcas Hoar, for example, who used divination; Goody Bishop, who owned dolls stuck with pins; and Candy, a slave who owned various ritual objects.

Occult activity was actually widespread in the colonies. The problem was that for the Puritans, who emphasized conversions and a "covenant of grace," "miracles" had ended with the Apostles, so anything arcane had to be either fake or of the Devil. But exceptions were made for men like John Winthrop, Jr., who had transported a large alchemical laboratory to Massachusetts. He was also the governor's son.

Almanacs containing astrological and anatomical lore were also excepted for a time, mainly because they were so popular. Even the Bible got less circulation. One 1700s almanac even quoted the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, father of alchemy and Greekified form of Thoth.

Among the early European colonists, spirituality often took an inward turn, the Pilgrims being one example. Some Christian settlers were influenced enough by Indian spiritualities to tend the occasional vision. In spite of this, visionaries were as often attacked, as when Ann Hutchison, midwife and spiritual guide, was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 after preaching reception of grace over achievement of works. She had many supporters, though, which makes sense given how many immigrants had arrived in the colonies to escape religious persecution, arbitrary authority, misuse of power, and ongoing wars.

Another visionary of that time, the Pietist Johannes Kelpius (original name Johann Kelp), led followers from Germany to Pennsylvania, settling on a ridge above the Wissahickon Creek gorge in 1693, then building a log tabernacle. Their interests mirrored what many today consider a California menu: alchemy, astrology, numerology, meditation, divination, apocalypticism, magic, Christian Kabbalah, utopian communalism, spiritual renamings of ardent seekers, and Rosicrucianism. The group alternated between healing, teaching, and spiritual advising among the settlers and bouts of seclusion for reflection and prayer, a tension that would always appear within Statesight. Kelpius himself wrote hymns, many of them. After his death his followers dispersed, having sought Eden but found Philadelphia.

The 1730s were another time of spiritual ferment; as Sister Rosetta would sing it down the road, strange things were happening every day. In England, John Wesley was leading a Protestant revivial called Evangelism. On the continent, Lutherans were turning to an anti-church Pietism of recovered individual faith; and the contemplative emphasis of Quietism, born in Catholic Italy, Spain, and France in the 1670s, began infiltrating Protestant circles. In the States, people were fed up with empty ritual and doctrinal rigidity and longed for a deeply felt experience of conversion.

Preachers George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards gave it to them. Although they brought the fire and brimstone and repentance that continues to characterize American religion, especially on the political right, they also emphasized faith as deeply felt, especially as a stirring of the Holy Spirit; Whitefield was seen trembling during sermons. Edwards had been found by a vision and preached it in Boston in 1731. In part the Awakening pushed back against the secular coolness of Enlightenment thought and its overemphasis on reason. Hundreds of Black slaves were freed in those years of inspiration.

Americans of the time did not want the vapid legalism of the Ten Commandments stuck on classroom walls: they wanted to feel the Holy Spirit moving in their hearts. They whirled, wailed, fell into trances, gave shouts of exaltation, and indulged enthusiasm and exuberance. Nearly always, the possessed tied these states and their pursuit to the urgency to be humane and make a more just world. "God manifest in the flesh of every man," Emerson wrote in his journal, "is a perfect rule of social life. Justify yourself to an infinite Being in the ostler and dandy and stranger, and you shall never repent."

In 1731, mystic Conrad Beissel established the Ephrata Cloister, a monastic settlement in Pennsylvania. He had studied Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Jakob Boehme, and Rosicrucianism. The members were celibate and practiced silent contemplation. They also made paper, farmed, wove, built buildings in an austere German style, and produced both calligraphy and copious amounts of music. American soldiers were hospitalized there during the Revolutionary War. The cloister finally closed in 1934.

Shortly before the American Revolution, Shakers under Mother Ann Lee practiced herbalism, dream interpretation, trance states, clairvoyance, and ritual work. They also opposed slavery and settler violence against the Indians and favored equal rights for women. (Emerson wrote, "If the women demand votes, offices, and political equality, as an Elder and Elderess are of equal power in the Shaker Families, refuse it not.") Since their founding they had also talked to their ancestors in seances, a practice influenced by seldom-credited African and Black spirituality. It heralded the waves of spiritualism to come.

In 1776, Jemima Wilkinson fell ill, suffered an intense visionary encounter with "the angel world," and emerged as Public Universal Friend, a trans person who preached abolition, universal kindness, feeding those in need (which was done), simple living, and love of God to people of any gender. No dogma, no doctrtine. They even inspired a treaty between George Washington and the Six Nations. The treaty was broken, as so many others were, but Washington's openness to such a figure might have been influenced by his and other Founders' membership in the Order of Freemasons and the Brotherhood of Rosicrucians, both of whom studied esoteric spirituality.

All this lively spirituality, including a renewed focus on freedom, individualism, and divine destiny, muted secular materialism, retired the loudest of the Puritans, and fed the idealistic fires of the American Revolution. Some believed that Jesus would not return until human beings had set things right on Earth.

For three decades or so, preachers roved the colonies, immense crowds gathered to be energized, and pews filled. Then things quieted, temporarily, at least on the surface.

Around 1800, by which time peep stones, dream interpretation, Masonic lodges, and the divining rod from Germany were in active use throughout the nation, the Second Great Awakening broke out in New England. (Boston had been an early hotbed of the First. The spirit of Uranian-Promethean upheaval has ever ruled Boston.) The Second brought less drama, less talk of predestination, more emphasis on personal salvation, and more institutionalization: colleges, seminaries, and missionary societies sprang forth from it. The abolition movement gained strength. Conversions, reform societies, revivals (originally from Presbyterian Scotland), and new denominations proliferated, many out on the frontier.

Most of the converts were women; some led experiments in utopian communities: New Lebanon, Greenacre, and many others. Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie Seer, offered visions of Heaven—he called it Summer Land, after which the Central Coast California city is named—that included people of every gender, color, religion, and social rank. (Edgar Allen Poe attended one of Davis's public trance sessions.) Davis was a direct influence on the Theosophical Society, which got its humble start in a New York City apartment. His wife Mary Fenn Love was one of the suffragists who assembled the 1853 New York State Women's Rights Conventions. The first woman to run for president of the US, Victoria Woodhull, was a suffragist, an abolitionist, and a medium.

In the land of the indigenous Erie, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga, later named Western New York, the Shakers vibrated to an invisible force that preceded colonization and would eventually outlive it. In 1876 it acquired a nickname courtesy of Rev. Charles Finney: the "burnt district" because of all the spiritual fire unleashed there from revivalists, utopians, abolitionists, suffragists, vegetarians, Shakers, Mormons, Millerites, table-tapping spiritualists, and other devotees of radical psychospiritual adventure. The nicknamed mutated into "Burned-Over District," and, as Mitch Horowitz observed, over time the "district" stretched westward along what is now Route 20 connecting New England with the Pacific Northwest: the longest continuous road in the US. Statistically, the spiritual activity there did not exceed that of other colonies, but a central roof beam of spirituality reached across the States nevertheless.

The lore of another place, Hill Cumorah, proved prominent at this time: local legends of a lost tribe of Israel and Captain Kidd's buried treasure reappeared in the teachings of former treasure hunter Joseph Smith. The hill had no prior name, and no evidence of battles or weapons. But this glacier-carved drumlin was where Smith claimed to have found buried golden tablets of the Book of Mormon. Into his religion Smith also imported several key symbols from Freemasonry.

A possible third Great Awakening broke out in the early or middle 1800s. Unlike its counterparts in other nations, it held a particularly American flavor, including revivals, activism, an emphasis on personal responsibility, strong influences by Black and indigenous spiritual practices, and an enthusiastic, reinventive mood despite the looming Civil War. In 1829, Black abolitionist and former slave Denmark Vesey wrote Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World to show that slavery and Christianity were incompatible. Even as a child, he had been described by white authorities as someone of "superior power of mind & the more dangerous for it." He was hanged for plotting to escape with others to Haiti.

In the mid-1800s, when the United States Government annexed Texas and big portions of the continental west, people of Mexican descent found themselves exiles in their own former homeland.

My ancestors have always lived with the land here in Texas. My indigenous ancestors go back twenty to twenty-five thousand years and that is how old I am in this country. My Spanish ancestors have been in this land since the European takeover which pulled migration from Spain to Mexico. Texas was part of a Mexican state called Tamaulipas. And Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of California and Colorado, were part of the northern section of Mexico. It was almost half of Mexico that the U.S. cheated Mexico out of when they bought it by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. By doing so they created the borderlands.
—Gloria Anzaldua

Religion and ritual became forces of support, solidarity, and resistance, but with a difference: "Ritual, mystery, and image," writes Virgilio Elizondo, "might well be called the trinity of the Mexican and Mexican-American cultural-religious identity. Dogma and doctrines seem to be so Western, while ritual and mystery seem to be so mestizo Mexican."

The missioners tried desperately to uproot all the ancient religions, but the laity—Spanish and Natives—simply constructed a new synthesis. This synthesis changed our native ancestors and their mestizo descendants not by the elimination of our religious ways, but by combining them with the Iberian-Christian ways to the mutual enrichment of both.

Central to this experience is the image of the brown Virgin of Guadalupe, a presence in countless visionary encounters and the source of music, lore, story, and other forms of spiritually informed culture.

Whether these Awakenings come to three, four, or one long Awakening, direct experience of Spirit joined hands with faith in the ability and responsibility of common people to create a more just society while the powerful and oblivious fought to further enrich themselves.

Early Depth Psychologists

It is well known that Sigmund Freud inaugurated depth psychology—the multidisciplinary study of the conscious mind's interactions with the unconscious—with the 1900 publication of his book The Interpretation of Dreams. As a young neurologist, he had been captivated by Jean-Martin Charcot's demonstrations of hypnosis in Paris, and even more by Pierre Janet's working out of Psychological Analysis, a system of healing for people traumatized by unresolved conflicts. Janet's system included talking therapy, an early form of free association via writing, and other elements Freud imported into his own system, which he called psychoanalysis.

What isn't well known is that in 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke in his philosophy of history lectures about the unconscious, the need for a science of the mind, and a universal soul that includes everyone's mind (later called "collective unconscious" by Carl Jung). Emerson did not work out a method from these ideas, but they rested on rich spiritual American soil in which the likes of Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) planted not only apple seeds but Swedenborgian ideas and bits of wisdom learned from Indians. Freud would have gone astray trying to analyze Chapman's anxious tending of injured horses but would have liked that Chapman—who was also a vegetarian—believed apples to hold symbolic meaning.

Like the early depth psychologists, Emerson ranged far afield culturally and intellectually: Sweden, Germany, France, Greece, Rome, China, India, Egypt, Persia. Lore from these and other lands seasoned his lectures and writings, which in turn influenced generations of deep seers and practitioners (and still do today). He had the depth-psychological knack of turning philosophical and spiritual ideas into deep teachings of and for the soul.

Although "depth psychology" would have to wait until psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined it in 1914 ("psychology" had been coined by Croatian poet and humanist Marko Marulić around 1510), Emerson and other Transcendentalists in 1840s New England were already describing it through Hermeticism (which Jung translated into psychological terms), Romanticism's focus on subjectivity and the unconscious, celebration of the feminine (Margaret Fuller to the fore), the interpretation of symbols popping up everywhere (including dreams), gnosis as a higher understanding than that of reason, and more, including the fascination with the wisdom traditions of other cultures.

Like the earliest depth psychologists, the Transcendentalists connected reflection with action: in their case, through sufferage, abolition, healing, social critique, nonviolence (Thoreau wrote about it and went to jail practicing it as "friction to stop the machine"), women's rights, healthy diets, yoga, and hydrotherapy, some of which was practiced at the utopian Fruitlands and Brook Farm communities. Writing played its active part: John Muir read Thoreau and Emerson, and activists and visionaries inspired by him would join hands with artists to save endangered places like Yosemite.

Jung had written his doctoral thesis on mediumistic practices. Some Transcendentalists attended seances (Emerson was skeptical) as spiritualism boomed on the east coast, fascinating millions (including grieving Mary Todd Lincoln) and giving women a chance to serve as spiritual leaders. Some relatives of men killed in the Civil War wanted to be in touch with the souls of the departed; others wanted a counter to the massification and industrialization of the unrolling Gilded Age, which, with the blessings of a corrupt Congress, picked up steam after 1873. Few linked the legacy of their spiritualistic inquiries to the ongoing ancestral conversations still prevalent in Black communities.

In Boston of the 1880s, depth exploration focused on altered states: William James (who preferred "transmarginal" to "unconscious") experimenting with hypnosis, cognition, and free will; magnetizing similar to what had caught Freud's eye in France; phrenology, aura reading, automatic writing, hypnosis, and of course herbalism, spiritualism (the first spiritualist church was founded in Boston in 1885), and a variety of psychical researches. Auguste Forel, who had directed the Burgholzli (now the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich) before Eugen Bleuler, corresponded with doctors and researchers in Boston; under his influence, hypnosis was studied in Zurich.

For some reason, Jung's acknowledged debt to William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, was cut from the autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections; nevertheless, in 1894, James brought the work of Janet, Freud, and Brueur to the US Lowell Institute on Exceptional Mental States. A year later, the Metaphysical Club was founded in Boston by Horatio Dresser and other mind cure colleagues; Julia Ward Howe, author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," gave the first public lecture. By 1900, research on psychotherapy (group as well as individual), multiple personality syndrome, hypnosis, and dream analysis (in 1905) was unfolding in Boston.

Meanwhile, James's Varieties (1902) linked the mystical side of life with the depths of consciousness. The Emmanuel movement (1906) connecting psychoanalysis, spirituality, hypnotic suggestion, and post-diagnosis consciousness exploration (anticipating Abraham Maslow's emphasis on peaks, plateaus, and self-actualization) had begun at Emmanuel Church in Boston, where visionary Elwood Worcester and Reverend Samuel McComb were giving religious healing a therapeutic bent. Worcester was a PhD who had studied with Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Fechner, the first an underappreciated social psychologist and the second a physiological psychologist by day and a nature mystic by night. The church and clinic also assisted the homeless and "nervous" and provided medical care. Freud's criticism of lay practitioners notwithstanding, the clinic responsibly referred out at intake those troubled by major psychiatric disorders. In 1912, articles on psychoanalysis appeared in Ladies Home Journal, which Worcester had written for, and similar periodicals.

All this exploration fed depth psychology in Europe while Freud courted American publishers and patients paying in American dollars and Jung impressed the wealthy McCormicks and Rockefellers and Mellons. Some movements, as Americans have long believed, need fiscal support to grow.

Awakening to Human Potential

By the 1890s, when stage magician Black Herman framed magic, astrology, and root medicine as resistance to racial oppression, the first swamis had arrived in the US and were greeted with reverent enthusiasm. In their wake sailed Katherine "Purple Mother" Tinley in San Diego, New Thought and its offshoots, Theosoophy in New York City and Beyond, Christian Science, John Wright Buckham, who wrote about "social mysticism" in Mysticism and Modern Life, and, by the Second World War, analysts like Erich Fromm and Karen Horney immigrating to American shores, some to become part of the New School for Social Research, where early studies on authoritarian psychology took place.

The momentum toward self-realizing methods and higher states continued, as it had since the earliest days here. If you were in Chicago in 1925, you could have witnessed the founding of the Moorish Science Temple of America, an esoteric and soon multi-city esoteric lodge devoted to self-transformation and racial uplift. If you had visited Los Angeles in 1934, you might have noted the rise of the esoteric Philosophical Research Society in Griffith Park. In 1946, at the State Teachers' College in New Britain, Connecticut, social scientist Kurt Lewin (coiner of the term "action research") and colleagues experimented with sensitivity training, a forerunner of encounter groups developed at the National Training Laboratories in Maine. In San Francisco, 1951, Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri, students of Sri Aurobindo, founded the Cultural Integration Fellowship, which evolved over time into the California Institute of Integral Studies. One of their colleagues, Alan Watts, arranged for Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki to come to the US. One of their students, Michael Murphy, co-founded Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

Yoga, Indian forms of meditation, Thomas Merton's writings, the counterculture Beats: all opened the road for Esalen in 1961, and with it, the Human Potential Movement. Humanistic and existential psychology rose and flourished; so did transpersonal psychology, named by Stan Grof (Jung's word ueberpersonlich was translated "transpersonal" by 1942, influenced perhaps by William James's use of "transmarginal" to mean something similar). Transformative schools and programs in higher ed sprang forth: Saybrook, the Institute of Transpersonal Studies, New College of California, Rudolf Steiner College, the California Institute of Integral Studies, Holmes Institute, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Naropa Institute, New College of California, the University of Philosophical Research. The consciousness studies program I now chair was born in 1979 at John F. Kennedy University.

This latest wave of psychospiritual awakening brought a variety of methods and offerings rooted in an old American insight: that we can be more than we consciously realize. "Holism" had been coined by Jan Smuts in 1926, but in the USA it came to mean whole-person activity, a mind-body-spirit orientation (depth psychology added soul) by which we could draw on resources receding into the mists of mental mystery. In 1929, British philosohper Alfred North Whitehead published Process and Reality, a difficult but far-reaching book that echoed all through process theology in the United States. In 1944, Howard Thurmond, future advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., having studied with mystics and conversed with Gandhi, was a founder of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. He was also active in Boston, where he delivered the Good Friday sermon at Marsh Chapel during a psilocybin experiment on how psychedelics might enhance spiritual experience; participants included Timothy Leary and Huston Smith.

In 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts photographed the famous Earthrise image. With Apollo 14 astronaut's Edgar Mitchell’s epiphany of unity in 1971, the stage was set for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Ralph Metzner had been experimenting with psychedelics, shamanic practices, Green Psychology, and altered states; in 1988, Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers that Earthrise might just be the new mythic image for our time. Soon came Deep Ecology, ecopsychology, ecotherapy, ecophenomenology, and other Earth-honoring disciplines with long indigenous and Black roots. Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Richard Tarnas, Jacob Sherman, and other philosophers describe a dawning participatory worldview replacing (as I have put it) the eradigmatic image of the Big Machine as a model of reality.

As astrology gained its psychological language, the term "New Age" floated from workshop to workshop along with the Age of Aquarius unpacked by Jung in his book Aion. The term had come from Rev. Warren Felt Evans' 1864 book The New Age and Its Messenger, which pitched Swedenborg as the messenger and New Thought as the means. Jung held synchronistically rather than causally the astrological passage of the Age of Pisces—symbolized by two fishes swimming in different directions—into the Age of Aquarius, the water bearer: the themes of these roughly 2,000-year chunks of cosmic time parallel developments on Earth without causing them. Symbolically, the aeon of opposites (spirit and matter, Christ and Antichrist) gives way to that of collective integration, with Earthrise as one of its beacons.

My friend Larry Saltzman asked me a while back, "What is the shadow of Earthrise?" As he pointed out, an enormous darkness occludes almost half the planet in the famous Apollo 8 photograph. "Globalism," I said without hesitation. Imperialism had always been an international plague, but with the machineries of domination supplied by Sorceror's Apprentice technocrats, a relative handful of tyrannical billionaires owned most of the world and gained more as the shadow lengthened.

The shadow grows visible by its self-defeating literalism. William Miller predicted a literal Final Judgment set for 1843. When it didn’t happen, he tried for 1844. People sold everything they had to follow him instead of wondering whether a world might be ending within them. The population of Shakers declined because they believed in literal celibacy. Scandal trailed Blavatsky, Leadbeater, and other Theosophists, many caught by infighting and dogmatism, as had been the case in the 1890s with the rigidly authoritarian Mary Baker Eddy. In 1893, Vivekananda of India attended the World’s Columbian Exhibition in celebration of Columbus’s murderous "discovery" of the New World, but no American Indian delegates were invited.

Back when the first mental healers reached American shores, back even before the science-fictiony language of Theosophy, esoterics began using scientific titles (Divine Science, Christian Science, Science of Mind) and terminology to make their claims appear reputable. But the vocabulary is always altered, as when zoological speculation about Lemuria, a sunken land bridge on which lemurs once migrated from Madagascar outward, turned into a lost mystical land.

This tendency to scientize persists, but it always lags about a century behind actual scientific developments. Today, for example, we have not only frequencies, vibes, and energies abroad, but quantum this and that, some of it based on a longstanding misinterpretation of the famous double slit experiment. (Looking at a wave of light does not turn it into a photon.) "Mediumship" became "channeling," and "energy" talk borrowed freely from the theory of the ether disproved by Einstein. A new vocabulary for spiritual experience is needed, but one without physics envy or the urge to take guiding metaphors so literally.

Science language mixed with esotericism was a Blavatsky specialty, and in the early 1900s, it spread through the States and in Europe and even India. With it went Blavatsky's troubling doctrine of a secret master race, a hierarchy of races (later elaborated by Steiner, a one-time Theosophist), the term "Aryan," and the image of the swastika; the last two were appropriated from Indian thought and culture and twisted to harmful ends.

In the thirties, the fascistic and segregationist I AM movement of Guy Ballard ("Godfre Ray King") and his wife Edna ("Lotus") perfected spiritual extortion, promising blessings from on high in exchange for donations. They channeled missives from The Great White Brotherhood, a team of ascended masters similar to those Blavatsky retained from reading bad science fiction. The 1960s alone saw Rajneesh and his Oregon commune, Silva’s mind control, the cult of Scientology, the cult of EST, Synanon's bullying and abuse, and the list goes on and on. Today, large segments of the seeker left follow RFK Jr.'s psychotic and lethal claims disguised as holistic health, a road opened by the channelings of Edgar Cayce and expanded by a wellness industry worth $2 trillion.

The condomless hookup of material gain and spirituality has always been problematic. Deepak Chopra's book on the supposed Seven Spiritual Laws of Success was merely a more recent sample of the original "pray and grow rich," Concentration: The Secret of Success (1909), and Mail-Order Messiah prosperity gospel snakeoil. The Secret and The Law of Attraction (appropriated from Davis) were other examples of this backdoor Calvanism per which those who are wealthy have received a divine sanction to be instead of, say, a larger than usual dose of ethically crippled brutality. If you don't turn up the lucky card, it must be your own fault; per A Course in Miracles, you're ill because you're warding off truth. Pray harder! As Marianne Williamson unwisely implied during one of her presidential semi-campaigns, such mind power could even deflect hurricanes if enough believers have faith.

Part of the esoteric shadow reached into American academia, where mainstream colleges had been for sale for decades. Transformational programs had never been properly supported in higher ed, and now they began to fail even before a Republican-dominated Congress cut Grad Plus student loans and severely limited what was left. A Chinese tech company took over ITP, fired most of the instructors and administrators, and rebranded what remained. The Institute of Imaginal Studies rebranded as Meridian U. In Golden, Colorado, Holmes Institute went under without even a teach-out of its students. In 2025, Naropa sold its home campus because of financial stress. Pacifica did the same. Against opposition, Pacifica and CIIS hired fiscally focused presidents with no background in what the schools taught.

Rudolf Steiner College, Holmes Institute, New College of California, the Depth Psychology Program at Sonoma State, Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University, the University of Philosophical Research: all gone. I had taught in many of the above programs, and I have wondered how long my own master's program will survive at a school where marketing support is zero and our faculty bios don't even appear on the program webpage—and this while interest in consciousness studies is swelling across the nation and beyond it.

Of course, the eclipsing of holistic studies is not just an American problem or even confined to higher ed. The Jung Institutes and Societies have struggled; the days of Rockefeller funding are long gone. Schumacher College was but one among other transformational European schools and Findhorn-like institutes to go under, although attempts are underway to bring Schumacher back. But in the extraverted States, a sprawling society keen on status, facade, speed, positivity, and externality, Statesight has represented the cultural underside of Protestantism, as Eugene Taylor has noted, and of a great deal else. Looking only on the bright side tends to blind our vision to the shadows in wait for the unwary.

Sidetracked by infighting, fragmented by a self-defeating distrust of unity, and overshadowed by poor leadership, spiritual narcissism, and lack of financial support, our work remains at the margins while the wellness industry booms. After all, when the public yearns for deep instruction that remains inaccessible, seekers will turn to influencers who pretend to offer the water of life, even when it turns out to be toxic.

From Out of the Shadow of Earthrise

And yet. In poll after poll, and below pulpit after pulpit, mainstream religious membership has been shrinking for decades. In fact, the majority of US adults are now "Nones," meaning the spiritual-but-not-religious with smaller numbers of agnostics and atheists mixed in. Spiritual seekers are now in the majority. Emerson had anticipated them: "You can never come to any peace or power until you put your whole reliance in the moral constitution of man, and not at all in a historical Christianity."

Perhaps seekers always were the majority, even in the days before polls, when it was not safe to suggest alternatives to traditional patriarchal Christianity. According to Jon Butler, religious belief was in crisis even in early colonial times. If historical longevity is the guide, then indigenous polytheistic animists have lived here a lot longer than anyone else has, and they still do. The United States was never a Christian nation, officially or otherwise.

All the national Awakenings of what Harold Bloom calls "our unacknowledged national faith" have been uniquely American: converted, optimistic, eclectic, and pragmatic as well as nature-reverent, joyful, Dionysian, communal, egalitarian, healing, insistent on the power of choice, devoted to making utopic change in the world, socially engaged, highly diverse in their origins, and widely available, even when shadowy misrepresentatives have charged high fees. At the heart of Statesight lives freely accessible imagination: not the made-up shallow kind which Emerson and Coleridge called "fancy," but imagination as deep and disciplined knowing. As Emerson clarified in his journals, “…The Fancy takes the world as it stands & selects pleasing groups by apparent relations, the Imagination is Vision, regards the world as symbolical & pierces the emblem for the real sense.”

The time is ripe for a reimagination of Statesight. Way back in 1838, Emerson warned the Harvard Divinity School: “The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.” The wineskins have been leaking for centuries even as the wine continues to pour into them. It has to go somewhere. In his journal he added: "One thing is certain: the religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them."

It has been said that we find ourselves in a Copernican revolution of consciousness: explosion of interest in the mystical and esoteric, the mythic and the archetypal, integral agendas, new therapies, ancient wisdoms from around the world, psychedelics, meditation, consciousness itself. "Awareness," writes Bloom, "centered on the self, is faith for an American: that may be the principal teaching of religious criticism as practiced by Emerson and by William James." April deConick writes about "Gnosticism and the New Age," and Jeffrey Kripal about "mutants and mystics" and worldview-breaking impossibilities that happen every day. Science fiction is the new fairy tale, and speculative fiction of all kinds a new worldwide mythology. Like it or not, the day has turned post-belief.

Given the depopulation of mainstream religion, which option now sets forth the more whole and deep spiritual story arc? Statesight is viable on its own, especially when taken playfully, creatively, and symbolically rather than narrowly, literalistically, or dogmatically. It’s not alternative anymore, if it ever was. It's where the majority of us live now, consciously or not.

A consciously held Statesight could offer much: a sense of belonging, for example, to a diverse cultural stream stretching back over many centuries. Membership in a network of earnest seekers and finders. Spiritual kinship and homecoming among people who value humaneness, open-mindedness, embodiment, justice, and experiments in Earth-honoring culture. We might also acquire a sense of ourselves as participants in a larger Pan-American spirituality, a Gnosis of the Americas going on all around us.

All this is possible only if we have outgrown the regressive urge to idealize teachers and leaders as stand-in parents for our wounded souls. As the Joseph Campbell Foundation has suggested, the Hero today (if we absolutely must have one) is the reflective community in action. Conscious Statesight is a spirituality for the responsible, not for shoppers.

American seekers have a lot more to bring to the table than their hungers, an emptiness waiting to be filled by whatever spiritual treasures or tangible goods they can grab from others. But to be bearers of gifts more than shoppers in a marketplace requires acquaintance with proximate, not fictive, pasts, with histories thick with conflict and deferral, not golden with perfection and realization.

—Leigh Eric Schmidt

It's clear that the United States is spiritually unmoored and has been for some time. No return to traditional ways will fix that. It never has. What's needed is a contemporary vision—a new cycle of stories: a reenchanting loreway—of how we want to be here, with ourselves, with each other, and with this damaged but blessed land we call home.