The "Spiritual But Not Religious" All You Can Eat Buffet

For a long time, I told myself a flattering story about my "journey."

It went something like this:

I grew up Christianity. Moved on to the "I'm spiritual but not religious" path. From there, I went down the Eastern Philosophical road of non-duality telling everyone I ran into that "we are all just one, bro". It was then only a matter of time before the curiosity train led me to science, logic, and proper reasoning in order to truly know what's true.

What do I mean by 'truth"? Truth = that which comports to reality (please leave your hard solipsism at the effin door. Ain't nobody got time for dat).

It's a clean arc. It sounds like growth. Like enlightenment.

But it's not the real story.

The real story is that I kept changing beliefs while protecting the same BS: I wanted certainty without paying the price of being wrong. And every stage of this journey had a product for that.

Christianity sells certainty through authority.

Spirituality sells certainty through intuition.

Non-duality sells certainty through experience.

And "woo" sells certainty through vocabulary (by stealing words from science and philosophy and twisting them into a permission slip).

The pivot for me wasn't "discovering science." It was discovering a question that cuts through every belief system, including my own:

What would change my mind? Or, better yet, if there was evidence that showed the opposite, would I be able to change my mind?

If you can't answer that clearly, then you're not doing truth-seeking. You're doing identity maintenance. You're doing comfort. You're coping.

And that's fine…..until you start confusing coping with knowledge.

So here is a quick summary of my mindset during each stage.

1) Christianity: the certainty machine

When you're inside Christianity (or any strong religious tradition), it doesn't feel like you're buying comfort.

It feels like you're buying clarity.

You're told there is a structure to reality, that your life matters in a cosmic sense, that morality has a foundation, that suffering has a purpose, that death isn't the end, that the universe isn't indifferent. You're given a narrative that makes your pain legible. You're given a community that reinforces it. You're given a framework that tells you, "You are not lost."

And, crucially, you're given a way to stop the mental search process: certainty is treated as a virtue. Doubt is treated as moral failure.

That's the first trap: if doubt is sin, then inquiry becomes psychologically expensive and you start to feel guilty for even questioning it.

You can still think, but only inside a bounded box. You can ask questions as long as they end where you were trained to end. If an answer threatens the structure, you learn to label it as a threat, not evaluate it: "temptation," "pride," "spiritual warfare," "lean not on your own understanding." Blah blah blah.

The problem isn't that Christianity is uniquely bad. The problem is its epistemology: authority becomes the mechanism of truth. And once "truth" is outsourced to authority, you stop needing to ask what would falsify the claims. You just need to trust the right source.

So when cracks appear such as historical contradictions, moral incoherence, unanswered prayers, impossible doctrines, well, you have two options:

1. revise the belief, or
2. protect it with explanations that can absorb anything.

At this point in my life I was reading people like Rob Bell and Francis Chan. But the "certainty machine" still mostly worked on me… until it didn't. My brother and sister dying had me questioning almost all of this, especially after hearing other Christians tell me that "they are in a better place" and "look at how many people got saved from this." The crack started to show and I started to question, but it certainly was not an "OK I'm done with Christianity and all other spiritual and religious things." My deconstruction journey was just beginning.

2) Spiritual-but-not-religious: firing the church, hiring vibes

When Christianity stopped working for me, I didn't become a hard-nosed rationalist overnight. I didn't suddenly become immune to the emotional functions religion had been serving.

I just changed suppliers. I took mushroom for the first time at the age of 26 and little did I know that one-time use would flip my entire life in the opposite direction.

• Started with authors like Ken Wilber, Alan Watts, Carl Jung, Spirit Science (trust me, look it up on YouTube), etc…
• Terms → we're all one, everything is energy, that was the old testament, God is love, the way Jesus lived was true Christianity.

"Spiritual but not religious" is often framed as liberation: no dogma, no gatekeepers, no institutions.

But it can quietly creep up on you and become this:

You remove external authority and replace it with internal authority.

Instead of "the Bible says," it becomes "I feel."

Instead of "the pastor taught," it becomes "the universe is telling me."

Instead of "God revealed," it becomes "my intuition knows."

I'm not denying that people have real experiences. They do. I have had them too. I understand that people feel awe, connection, meaning, peace, terror, transcendence, unity, dissolution of ego. Those experiences can be profound. They can change your life, but the danger is when we treat experience as a direct pipeline to metaphysical truth when we slide from phenomenology (what it feels like) to ontology (what is real). Your mind becomes a courtroom where feelings are the judge, jury, and executioner.

At that point, you can "know" anything.

And if you can "know" anything, you're no longer constrained by reality. You're constrained by preference.

3) Eastern philosophy → non-duality → "we are all one bro": insight, then inflation

This phase is tricky to write about because there's real value in it and it's especially wonderful when something in a Taoist text clicks and you just start to laugh.

Eastern philosophy can do something Western religion often fails to. It can teach you to observe your mind, to detach from compulsive narratives, to see the ego as a process, to stop mistaking every thought for a command. It can produce real psychological benefits. Meditation, attentional training, and contemplative practice can change your relationship to suffering.

But like all self-help BS the same risk shows up again because the human mind is predictable:

We have a powerful experience, and then we inflate it into our worldview.

We have a moment where the boundary between "self" and "world" feels less rigid. We feel unity. We feel love. We feel dissolution of ego. We feel "oneness."

And then, here's the leap, someone tells you:

"See? That proves we are one."

No. Once again, all it proves is that you had an experience. It proves your brain can generate a certain state. It proves consciousness has modes. It does not automatically prove a metaphysical claim about the structure of reality.

This is where the "we are all one bro" meme is useful. Because it captures the problem: a real subjective insight becomes a lazy cosmic conclusion.

And once that conclusion is in place, it becomes immune to criticism because it's packaged as depth. Anyone who challenges it is "too rational," "too egoic," "too Western," "not awakened", and sometimes accused of being to stupid to understand (cough, cough, Jordan Peterson's evangelists).

But once again, that's just dogma with incense.

4) The core realization: being wrong feels like being right

This is the sentence that wrecked me (in a good way):

Being wrong feels exactly like being right from the inside.

Nobody walks around saying, "I'm wrong, and I choose to keep believing this."

What we actually do is build an internal model of reality.

That model predicts things.

And when an experience threatens the model, it is not an "update", it feels like your identity is in danger.

So the question becomes:

How do you keep yourself from believing what you want to be true? How do you stop tricking yourself?

That's what I actually wanted the whole time, even when I didn't know how to ask for it:

I want to know as many true things and as few false things as possible.

And to do that, you need a definition of "true" that doesn't depend on comfort, status, tradition, or vibes.

5) True = that which comports with reality

Here's the operational definition:

True = that which comports most with reality.

Not "what inspires me."

Not "what helps me cope."

Not "what my group rewards."

Not "what feels deep."

Reality is the constraint. Reality is the boss fight.

Beliefs are maps. Reality is the territory. And the only reason a map matters is whether it helps you navigate what's actually there.

So now the question becomes:

How do you test whether your map matches the territory?

6) The falsifiability gate: "what would prove it wrong?"

Any time I recognize a belief in my head I immediately argue the opposite by asking myself "what would prove this to be wrong?"

If you can't specify what evidence would prove your claim wrong, you don't have knowledge, you have a preference.

That doesn't mean you're evil. It means you're human.

But it changes the entire game. Because suddenly, beliefs have to carry weight. They have to risk loss. They have to put skin in the game.

This is basically the core of street epistemology. Don't start with dunking on conclusions; start with methods. Ask what confidence someone has, why, and what would change it.

If the answer is "nothing could change my mind," then we're not in a truth conversation. We're in a loyalty conversation.

7) Why logic and the scientific method is the way to know

Let me be precise, because people get weird here.

I'm not saying science answers every question.

I'm not saying science makes life meaningful.

I'm not saying you should treat scientists like priests.

I'm saying something narrower:

The scientific method is the only reliable public method we have for distinguishing what's true from what we merely want to be true.

Why?

Because it bakes in the thing humans are worst at: error correction.

• It forces you to define claims clearly.
• It forces you to generate predictions.
• It forces you to test those predictions against reality.
• It forces you to check bias (selection bias, funding bias, small N, etc.).
• It forces methods to be transparent enough that other people can try to reproduce results.
• It forces peer scrutiny, which is basically institutionalized "try to prove me wrong."

And that last part is key: intersubjective verification.

Your private experience might be real. But "real to you" is not the same as "true about the world."

Science is not a vibe. It's a social technology for reducing self-deception.

8) Why woo exists: people twist science and philosophy to fit an agenda

This is the part that still pisses me off:

A huge portion of the self-help / spirituality marketplace survives by taking real concepts from science and philosophy and laundering them into unfalsifiable sales pitches.

• "Quantum" becomes a magic word that means "mystical permission."
• "Energy" becomes a metaphysical substance you can never measure.
• "Epigenetics" becomes "your thoughts rewrite reality."
• "Neuroscience" becomes "here's a brain word, therefore my program is true."
• "Ancient wisdom" becomes "don't ask for evidence."

It's rhetorical camouflage and agenda-fitting.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it: the claim is always structured so it can't lose.

That's not knowledge. That's marketing.

9) My current operating rules (epistemic hygiene)

Here are the rules I try to live by now, imperfectly, but seriously:

1. State the disconfirming condition. If I can't say what would falsify it, I don't get to call it "true."
2. Separate phenomenology from ontology. "I felt unity" is not "the universe is one."
3. Update confidence, don't "convert." Beliefs should be probabilistic degrees of confidence, not identity badges.
4. Treat identity-protecting beliefs as suspects. If it would emotionally destroy me to be wrong, I'm probably biased.
5. Prefer boring, testable claims over cosmic conclusions. Grand metaphysics is cheap. Predictive power is expensive.

This isn't about becoming a robot. It's about becoming less manipulable by other people and by your own mind.

The one question you should ask your own beliefs

If you take nothing else from this, take the question:

What would change my mind?

Ask it about religion.

Ask it about spirituality.

Ask it about politics.

Ask it about the story you tell yourself about your life.

Ask it about the "deep" thing you heard on a podcast that made you feel seen.

Hell, ask it about the toothpaste you swear is the best.

If the answer is "nothing," then call it what it is, a commitment.

And if you want truth, not comfort, not aesthetics, not identity, then you need a method that can survive contact with reality.

That method is not perfect. Nothing is.

But it has one feature that every bullshit belief system avoids:

It can lose.

And that's why it works.

To Wrap Things Up

One of the biggest things I have learned in my life is that the Dunning Kreuger Effect is one of the most real things us monkeys our susceptible to. This is something to be very aware of.

Any time you say something with confidence stop and ask yourself how much you really know about the subject/topic. I am not saying everyone who has confidence in the subject they are talking about doesn't know shit. What I am saying is there is not a doubt in my mind that the deeper I dive into a topic I truly feeling like I don't know a dam thing about it.

Always argue the opposite. Hold debates in your head. And always try to find ways to cut through your biases.