Do you wish you got into this event for free? Become a Chacruna member and receive free or discounted access to all Community Forums, Courses, Workshops, and more! Also get full access to our entire archive of past forum recordings and join our global network of psychedelic professionals and activists to dive deeper into discussion and discovery.
We invite you to explore how spirituality and conspiracy thinking intertwine in the search for hidden truths in our post-truth era. This Community Forum examines what “conspirituality” actually names – a belief system, a political alignment, or a broader configuration of capacities and frameworks – and why that distinction shapes how we respond to it. Psychedelic and contemplative practices can produce a powerful felt sense of disclosed truth; we’ll ask when that certainty becomes self-sealing and unfalsifiable, and how it comes to be maintained by emotional necessity. The panel will also consider practices of epistemic discernment that don’t require foreclosing on ontology, and how to critique conspirituality without reproducing its own logic of locating contaminated others. Broader threads include the discursive meanings of “spirituality” and “conspiracy theory,” parallels between religious and conspiratorial narratives, the causes of the “post-truth” era and the crisis of meaning, the shift toward metamodernism, and the challenge of navigating emic-etic boundaries in research on spirituality and psychedelics. This Community Forum brings together Dr. Daan Frans Oostveen, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Humanistic Studies; Dr. Sharday Mosurinjohn, Associate Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University; Li Chun Marina Lin, a former travel journalist and shamanic practitioner; and Dave Vliegenthart, an interdisciplinary scholar of new religious movements and contemporary spirituality.
Dr. Daan Frans Oostveen (Eindhoven 1985) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Humanistic Studies. He is the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Future Humanities. For his doctoral research, he spent a year as a research fellow at the People’s University of China in Beijing in 2018, studying contemporary Chinese religious diversity. He is a founding member of the New European Humanities in the 21st Century Network, which works on connecting innovative research on the humanities in Europe for the World Humanities Report. His research interests include critical religion, comparative philosophy, psychedelic humanities, and posthumanism. His commitment to fostering critical thinking and dialogue within academia reflects his dedication to advancing understanding in complex cultural contexts.
Dr. Sharday Mosurinjohn is Associate Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University, Kingston ON. She is interested in the relationships between art, science, and religion in esotericism. Much of her research concerns how human experience is shaped by technologies ranging from digital information tech, as in her first book The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom, to psychedelics, as in her new book project, which explores how people are using science and religion to negotiate metaphysical questions arising in contemporary psychedelic culture. Mosurinjohn is a co-founder of the Human Augmentation Research Network, volunteers with local and national psychedelic organizations, serves on steering committees at the American Academy of Religion (Religion & Drugs; Emerging Technologies), and is part of a working group on the entheogenic humanities.
As a former travel journalist, Li Chun Marina Lin has spent almost twenty years traveling around the world to study from various shamanic cultures. She works with an Acacia Confusa ayahuasca analog from Asia weaves her shamanic practices toward Re-enchantment, ancestral healing, and creative expression. She has maintained a deep connection to and studied plant spirits intensely. Believing in the non-duality of body and earth (身土不二, literally: “body soil no two,” which means that the body’s present condition is the result of its environment), she continuously refines approaches of touching another person’s soul through the five senses and consciousness expansion. She is also skilled in traditional Chinese tea ceremonies and Japanese Butoh.
Dave Vliegenthart is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies discursive entanglements of “secular” and “religious” beliefs and practices of Asian-inspired charismatic leaders and (their) new religious movements in Euro-American cultures. His research focuses on tensions between intellectual and anti-intellectual tendencies in the history of contemporary (modern, postmodern, metamodern) spirituality, particularly of people who today identify as “Spiritual But Not Religious.”
