Crystals and conspiracy theories: my crash course in spirituality

Am I feeling sceptical? You could say that. I like to think of myself as a rationalist. I believe in certain physical “laws”. I think that most things, on balance, are rooted in material phenomena. I don’t believe in ghosts and spirits. I stopped believing in them around the time I stopped believing in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.

Yet I also own books that would probably get me expelled from the ultra-sceptical new atheist milieu. On my bookshelves, alongside works by Karl Marx and Bertrand Russell, sit The Power of Now and A New Earth, tomes by the German spiritual teacher and Oprah Winfrey book club favourite Eckhart Tolle. I like to meditate and I do think it is possible to be too rational.

But perhaps my own ambiguity about spirituality is irrelevant. Conscious Life is billed as an event that aims to bring science and spirituality together, to bridge the gap between Socratic thinking and gut feeling.

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Spirituality is big business in the United States. The Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles can attract 20,000 people. Americans come in their droves to listen to healers, reiki masters and assorted new age luminaries. Around a quarter of US adults consider themselves to be “spiritual but not religious”. Around a sixth of Britons define their beliefs that way. Traditional, established religion carries too much historic baggage for some. Spirituality seems to offer a non-dogmatic alternative.

The setting for the expo – a small conference room at the end of a dingy and labyrinthine corridor in a west London hotel – feels an incongruent place to conduct the important work of building a new earth. The turnout is disappointing too. It is Friday, so many people will be at work, but there are more scheduled speakers present than audience members, although one of the organisers assures me that the live stream is very popular.

During the first day I sit through a talk on parapsychology, the sympathetic study of paranormal claims. One of the speakers, an academic from the University of Northampton, has published a book called Telephone Calls from the Dead, which should give you a flavour of the presentation. A brief discussion on the possibility of levitating a pencil takes place. I am intrigued. Disappointingly, however, the panel moves swiftly on to the topic of premonition and the “quantum realm”. Animals have the power of premonition too, apparently. There are birds that can see into the future. Worms as well, although I struggle to understand why they would want to: what would they see apart from even more soil?

Parapsychology “challenges people’s worldviews”, says Dr Callum Cooper, author of the aforementioned book. A psychologist and academic, Cooper warns us about “hearsay on the internet”. As a journalist, hearsay on the internet is one of my specialities, so I immediately type “parapsychology” into Google. I land on Wikipedia, which labels it a “pseudoscience” that is “rejected by a vast majority of mainstream scientists”. I feel vindicated in my initial scepticism.

Anne Jirsch, intuitive tarot and professional psychic

JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE

Then the lights suddenly go out. Is this an intervention by the spirits? Or is one of the event’s organisers standing behind a curtain flicking a switch? Is someone, corporeal or otherwise, trying to play a trick on me? A woman named Anne Jirsch, an intuitive tarot reader, sidles up to me and whispers in my ear. “Sometimes things like this happen,” she says with a knowing smile as two hotel employees scramble around behind the stage curtain.

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“Angels are my bag,” says a female speaker on stage. It was starting to feel like they were mine too: day two of Conscious Life and I had already heard a lot about angels.

“When the angels want to tell me something, I get this buzzing,” says another woman, Daisy Floss, who is standing in front of the stage waving her hands in the air. “They send messages through my ears.”

Floss, a “healer”, is leading a session designed to help us “dive into the celestial world of angels and star beings”.

“For nearly 40 years I didn’t know I had wings,” Floss tells us. I have known Floss for 40 minutes and hadn’t noticed them either.

Princess Diana is another frequent topic of discussion at Conscious Life, perhaps because the princess is sometimes likened to an angel by her adoring fans. “We are only just beginning to see the impact she’s had on our lives,” Stewart Pearce, an angel whisperer and internationally renowned voice and presence coach, booms from the stage during his 90-minute presentation.

Stewart Pearce, angel emissary

JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE

Pearce, 68, is wearing a striking cobalt blue suit finished off with a turquoise gem-studded belt buckle. He certainly has presence.

“Diana downloaded energy from the Sphinx.”

I have no idea what this means.

After Pearce’s talk, questions come in from the floor. “I believe Diana was executed,” says a YouTuber who claims to be descended from extraterrestrials. I stare into my green tea for a moment, then look up – nobody seems perturbed by what’s been said.

I had already met Pearce, a former master of voice at the Globe Theatre in London, earlier in the day. We sit in a conference suite to talk about his work as a voice and presence coach. Pearce has worked with Margaret Thatcher and Mo Mowlam. He also claims to have been Princess Diana’s confidential voice and presence coach from 1995 until her death in 1997. He is here at Conscious Life under two guises: voice and presence coach and “angelic emissary”. I ask him about the second of these.

“What it means is that I’m a spokesperson for the angelic kingdom,” Pearce replies.

I feel silly for asking. But then, at Conscious Life, perhaps it is a silly question.

I also find the conviction with which Pearce speaks slightly discombobulating. Presence and personal magnetism are compelling qualities. They are also slightly mysterious: we couldn’t necessarily explain what they are, but we know them when we see them. This is the practical aspect of what Pearce teaches. Admittedly, I am more interested in this than the spiritual stuff.

Pearce is a former actor, though he left the acting world behind in the Seventies.

“I was about to make a movie in Hollywood. And the telephone rang and it was my brother. He said, ‘Mum’s got terminal cancer. She’s got three months to live.’ So I came back to the United Kingdom and nursed her for a year.”

Pearce’s life shifted dramatically after his mother’s death. “A voice coach whom I’d worked with at the Royal Shakespeare Company called me saying, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I’ve lost my agent. Twentieth Century Fox says I’m in breach of contract.’ She said, ‘There’s this woman I want you to work with. She’s taking over the Tory party.’” Two weeks later I’m walking into Downing Street.”

I decide to ignore the fact that Thatcher actually became Conservative leader four years before being elected prime minister. How does Pearce reconcile voice coaching with his work as an “angelic emissary”?

“You don’t walk into Downing Street saying, ‘Hi, I see angels…’ So I’ve always kept my mysticism in a cupboard… But here [at Conscious Life] it’s mind, body and spirit.”

Back in the conference room I listen to Pearce’s presentation. “I’m going to open you up!” Pearce announces. He is preparing to lead us through a collective meditation. “We have the possibility of becoming human angels.”

As we close our eyes and things get under way, I try to master “ha” breathing, an ancient Huna technique for building energy. I draw in a deep breath through my nose and let it out again through my mouth, emitting a “ha” sound. I feel very relaxed. I am letting go.

After about ten minutes the room emerges from slack-jawed bliss. We break for non-alcoholic watermelon cocktails. Cream cheese canapés are being laid out on a trestle table. Pearce remains the centre of attention.

“William Blake visited me at 13,” he says to an attendee in his unmistakable voice. He distributes copies of his latest book, Diana: The Voice of Change. It is a self-help tome featuring breathing exercises Pearce calls the “Diana Heart Path”. He hands me a signed copy. The techniques, the blurb on the back of the book says, are “the legacy that Diana wanted”.

I enjoy meditating. Not only because it improves my concentration, but because stillness can generate its own power. When practised on a regular basis, meditation provides a toolkit for accessing what the spiritual community likes to call “flow state”, otherwise known as “being in the zone”. You know when you are in flow state because time seems to stand still. Pearce calls it the “crystallisation of the moment”. And it is achieved, paradoxically, by not thinking.

I worry that I may be being unduly harsh on the spirituality community in some of my instinctive judgments, so back at home I make a phone call to Jules Evans, an honorary research fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations. Evans has a deep interest in spirituality. He describes it as “giving you access to ideas and practices that have been around for millennia. At the heart of new age spirituality is the simple idea that no religion has a monopoly on the truth. And that you can find incredible ideas and practices in many different spiritual traditions.”

This seems reasonable to me. Yet the pandemic brought something worrying to the surface. Evans tells me he had a “rude awakening” in March 2020 as the world went into lockdown. He began to notice spiritual friends and new age influencers sharing “very far-out theories” about the virus.

“David Icke was suddenly considered a prominent thinker to understand what was going on… [Spiritual teachers] were sharing things about “Pizzagate” [a discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that high-ranking Democratic Party officials were involved in a paedophile ring] and QAnon. I thought, what is happening with my culture?”

The ecosystem of the internet is one explanation. The web is feeding polarisation and encouraging clickbait in the spirituality community just as it is in politics. Wild claims pick up traction faster online than nuanced arguments. And where the clicks go, the money follows.

“What happened during the pandemic was the livelihood of a lot of new age coaches and gurus and shamans was threatened by the lockdown. There were no retreats. And unfortunately, a lot of them discovered that if they shared conspiracy content they got lots of likes. They tapped into the kind of fear and paranoia [and] it became a cheap way to boost your likes.”

I ask Evans if the spiritual community is especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories.

“In frightening times people [in general] can get more prone to mythical, apocalyptic thinking.”

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“Hi London. Hi LA. And hi everybody who’s everywhere else!”

The words, delivered in an upbeat New York accent, are spoken by a woman in her sixties. With cropped hair and a blue blazer, she looks business-like and knows how to command a stage. She feels like a weightier proposition than some of the previous speakers. She might also be a more dangerous one.

Seeing the name of Lynne McTaggart on the billing of Conscious Life depresses me. McTaggart is the founder of a magazine called What Doctors Don’t Tell You (recently renamed Get Well). The magazine was banned by some UK retailers due to disinformation contained within its pages. These included claims that vitamin C could cure HIV and that the cervical cancer vaccine was killing hundreds of young girls. One especially inflammatory article claimed that autism could be “reversed” using “mercury detox” and craniosacral therapy.

Lynne McTaggart, author specialising in spiritual change

STUART CONWAY/CAMERA PRESS

McTaggart is at Conscious Life to promote something called the “Intention Experiment” – ie the power of positive thinking to “heal the world”. She makes abundant use of slides during her presentation. One bears the title “Healed in 10 minutes” and features a list of medical miracles supposedly produced by the collective power of positive thinking: “Linda reversed stage 4 lung cancer”; “Beverly healed her dislocated shoulder”; “Joan’s post-stroke eye damage healed”. McTaggart plays us a video clip of a young woman rising from a wheelchair having previously been paralysed from the neck down. Another clip features an interview with a man in his mid-forties who claims to be “ageing backwards”. It is all a question of mind over matter, apparently.

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Some of the talks at Conscious Life fall under the heading of what the self-described “spiritual” person and host of the popular YouTube channel Rebel Wisdom, David Fuller, calls “benevolent conspiracy”. The 2006 film The Secret was also an example of this. The film promotes the message that, as Fuller puts it, “If you have positive thoughts, the universe will arrange itself in your favour.” This is what is typically meant when the spiritual community talks about “manifesting” things.

It isn’t a harmful belief necessarily. Referencing the vocabulary of psychedelia, Jules Evans likens these narratives to a “good trip”. The problem, however, is that a good trip can easily morph into a bad one. In relation to spirituality, a “bad trip” represents an inversion of the euphoric mystical experience, resulting in a psychological state characterised by conspiratorial paranoia.

“In both [trips], the individual awakens to this hidden reality,” Evans says.

Most of the things I hear at Conscious Life might be described as a “good trip”. However, McTaggart’s work seems more like a “bad trip”. As do some of the other things I hear.

Tracey Ash, ascension pioneer

JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE

“I’m very concerned about the 5G circuit frequency fence that is being constructed around the planet,” says Tracey Ash, an exuberantly dressed “metaphysics” and “new earth” specialist, as we chat in a small suite adjoining the main room. During our 30-minute conversation, Ash also makes several dubious claims about vaccines.

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Talk of spirit bonds, telepathy and the quantum realm seemed like harmless fun. I was certainly not going to be storming the stage brandishing a copy of Richard Dawkins.

Yet around the world right now, large numbers of people are dying from Covid-19. Many are unvaccinated because they have been taken in by disinformation. Since July 2021, more than 99 per cent of Covid deaths in the United States have involved unvaccinated individuals. And so there comes a point when certain ideas should probably not be treated as harmless eccentricities.

“It hasn’t really mattered so much until the pandemic,” says Jules Evans. “Like, OK, your hippy mate has some kooky beliefs. That’s all OK until it’s a health crisis. Then those kooky beliefs are a serious threat.”

The overlap between spirituality and conspiracy thinking has been dubbed “conspirituality”. Evans recently unearthed a 2018 study of 1,200 people that found that the strongest predictor of conspiracy thinking was “schizotypy”, a personality trait that makes a person prone to unusual beliefs. These can include belief in things such as telepathy and hidden personal meanings in events etc. People who are “spiritual but not religious” have been found to score more highly in schizoptypal personality traits than either the religious or the non-religious.

But rationalists should not be too condescending: certain forms of ecstatic or schizotypal inspiration can be beneficial to society. “Many great scientific discoveries and cultural creations have come from ecstatic or schizotypal inspiration, from Newton’s discovery of gravity to Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Evans writes on one of the blog posts he forwards to me.

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It is the final day of Conscious Life and I find myself in a bad mood. “The knowledge is inside you, not in a book,” one of the speakers declares from the stage. This irritates the writer in me. The search for knowledge begins with humility, with the admission that “I don’t know”. The answer to, “I don’t know,” is often found in a book written by someone else, someone who does know.

At its best, spirituality gives us access to ideas and practices that have been around for millennia, some of which are evidence-based. However, the notion that we already possess all the knowledge we could ever need – if only we tap into our emotions – just sounds instinctively wrong (not to mention arrogant).

Another frequent criticism of the wellness and spirituality communities centres on their apparent indifference to the material world. “The fundamental message of the mindfulness movement is that the underlying cause of dissatisfaction and distress is in our heads… Self-absorption trumps concerns about the outside world,” writes Ronald E Purser in his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

“Loving yourself is the key,” one of the speakers at Conscious Life tells the audience.

But surely this is only true up to a point? “Self-care” might help us to address our inner turmoil, but what about the bigger questions? A revolution of the mind is one thing; however sometimes you need to put the crystals away and go a bit Che Guevara.

A wider backlash seems to be brewing against “McMindfulness”.

“Wellness has been really trashed during the pandemic,” says Jules Evans. “You’ve seen things like [the TV shows] Nine Perfect Strangers or The White Lotus, and they’re holding up a mirror to the ugly face of wellness. And Goop [a range of wellness products] with Gwyneth Paltrow. You know, ‘woo woo’ theories and the overlap between wealth and spirituality, where it just seems to be about pampering and endless personal healing journeys.”

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But Covid-19 has also drawn people toward spiritual and religious ideas. Sales of Bibles and Korans shot up during the initial months of the pandemic, as did Google searches for “prayer” and “Christianity”.

For those who are not religious in the traditional sense, spirituality can fill the void during times of crisis. Several speakers at Conscious Life told me of the physical and mental health setbacks they went through prior to their spiritual journeys.

Such setbacks are sometimes referred to in psychology as the “dark night of the soul”, a moment of immense pain and spiritual desolation.

My own dark night of the soul occurred in April 2020, during the first lockdown. It was a culmination of things. I was shielding my 91-year-old grandmother from Covid. I was being stalked online. I was struggling with undiagnosed ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), which was having an impact on my writing. There was also the anxiety and dread that accompanied the early stages of the pandemic. Internally, I felt as if I were on fire. I started to revaluate the things that were important in my life.

“The coping strategies and ways of interacting with the world and our conditioning that we had from our upbringing, that gets us so far,” says David Fuller, who has been through his own mental health challenges. “And then we’ll have a crisis or lose a job or suffer the breakdown of a relationship. And those coping strategies no longer work. People then find they need something more. And a lot of people find real power in spirituality and Buddhist traditions, or in asking who we really are.”

“In September 2000, I contemplated suicide,” says Marilyn Devonish, a hypnotherapist, Huna practitioner and the MC for the Conscious Life event. Devonish, 53, is chatty and speaks with a distinctive Watford accent. She is also grateful, especially to a former partner of hers who had an affair. Yes, you read that right. “I always say, look, I am so happy and grateful that my partner had an affair, because if he hadn’t done so, I would still probably be the buttoned-up version of myself.”

The concept of being grateful when bad things happen is anathema to most of us. But this kind of acceptance forms an important tenet of spirituality. “Are there experiences that we’re here to have?” she says. “Are there things that will happen along your life path, which will help you to evolve and grow?”

Probably. But I struggle with the idea that some things were preordained to begin with. There are a lot of things that happen to people that do not have a happy ending. Sometimes struggle leaves permanent scars. Perhaps those of us who come out the other side just get lucky. But I can also see it from Devonish’s point of view. Setbacks, even deeply painful ones, can sometimes prove serendipitous over the long term.

“That scenario tipped me over the edge and I picked up the phone [to the] Samaritans,” says Devonish. “It also laid me open for what was going to happen the month after.”

What happened the month after was that Devonish signed up for a course that would change her life. “I was studying to be a chartered accountant… [I was] very quiet and shy, no confidence, terrified of public speaking. And I realised that to be a decent accountant, I might actually have to talk to people. So I signed up to what I thought was a communication skills course.”

But she got more than she bargained for. “It turned out it was full-on personal development. And that’s how it started. I actually tried to get a refund when I saw that it included hypnosis and timeline therapy and Huna.”

As Devonish tells the story of the conference 21 years ago, I recognise some of my own behaviour at Conscious Life.

“I sat at the back of the room for probably the first three and a half days, arms folded, face like thunder, asking loads of questions, normally analytical questions. I wanted to catch them out and find all the loopholes.”

But this is where our stories diverge.

“By the end of the seven days, I was completely transformed. I was like, whoa!”

And today, is Devonish happy and fulfilled?

“Every day I wake up, there’s an element of excitement. Whereas previously, I woke up with a feeling of dread. I would be the person who was really happy on a Friday night, pretty good on Saturday, and around three o’clock on Sunday I would start getting depressed, because it’s going to be Monday morning… It was just the cycle, that was what it was.”

Many of us are familiar with “the cycle”.

“Now, I wake up every day with a sense of excitement. I’m just open and curious to see what’s going to happen today.”

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Karl Marx famously called religion “the heart of a heartless world” and the “soul of our soulless conditions”. I wonder if this is also true of spirituality. Is its main function to inspire us? To make us feel better? And is there anything wrong with that? Spirituality seems to enrich Marilyn Devonish’s life immensely. So I ask her, does it matter if this stuff is evidence-based?

“I’m not going to sit here and debate with you whether past lives are real. Quite frankly, I don’t care. However, what I do care about is if we resolve something you perceive was in a past life, and it helps you resolve something in this lifetime. And [it helps you to] be happier, more fulfilled. That’s what I’m interested in.”

I think facts are important. I am a journalist, so obviously I do. But I can see what Devonish is getting at. We can all be reluctant to demystify things when it suits us. Think about our cultural ideas around love, for example. We are biological machines with innate drives and “hard-wired” preferences. Yet we like to think of ourselves almost as characters in an enchanted fairytale, princes and princesses in search of one true love. When it comes to romance, few of us want to completely demystify the world.

But it is also important, as Evans says, to balance the transcendent with a stiff dose of critical thinking.

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“Frequencies”, “chakras”, “dragon energy”, “manifesting abundance”, “authentic self”, “vibrational energy”, “flow”, “empaths”.

Even if I was unsure about some of the things I had heard at Conscious Life, I had acquired a new vocabulary over the three days. Shared language can foster a sense of belonging. It can also produce a mentality of us against them, of the enlightened ones who have escaped “the matrix” versus the ignorant “sheep”. You could say this is where the battle for the soul of spirituality takes place: between the meaning and solace it gives to some, and its tendency to generate unhealthy delusions that may harm others. A bit like traditional religion, in a way.

I leave the Hilton and begin to make my way home. I am not sure Britain is ready for Conscious Life. I did meet some very nice people, though. Perhaps one day I will be a fellow light warrior. But what I want right now is a cold beer. I open Google Maps and find somewhere. The technology sends me to the right location this time. Obviously it’s what the spirits want.