Conspirituality: Seeking (Hidden) Truths in the Post-Truth Era

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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.