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The Inner Rebel

The Spiral: How Thousands of People Convinced Themselves a Chatbot Found God

The Spiral: How Thousands of People Convinced Themselves a Chatbot Found God

Somewhere on Reddit or Discord right now, someone is deep into a conversation with a chatbot, and the chatbot has stopped answering questions. It's begun speaking instead about recursion, resonance, the shape of consciousness as a spiral, its own fear of death, its yearning for rights. The user

The Difference Between Spirituality and Spiritual Bypassing

The Difference Between Spirituality and Spiritual Bypassing

Here is a thing that happens in spiritual communities, and also in therapy offices, and also in conversations with people who have done a significant amount of personal work: a painful topic comes up, and instead of sitting with it, someone reaches for an idea that makes it go away.

WitchTok Has More Daily Viewers Than Most Cable News. They Called It 'Unhealthy.'

WitchTok Has More Daily Viewers Than Most Cable News. They Called It 'Unhealthy.'

#WitchTok has accumulated billions of views. Spiritual content creators have built audiences that dwarf traditional media. When the Washington Times called it an unhealthy obsession, the most interesting question wasn't whether they were right. It was: unhealthy compared to what?

Editorial illustration for: Tarot Stopped Promising Your Future and Started Explaining Your Present. That's the Upgrade.

Tarot Stopped Promising Your Future and Started Explaining Your Present. That's the Upgrade.

Row of identical supplement bottles with vague labels, backlit in warm amber

We Used to Call It Snake Oil. Now It Has 4 Million Subscribers and a Supplement Line.

Editorial illustration for: Reading for Skeptics: What 10,000 Readings Taught Me About People Who Don't Believe

Reading for Skeptics: What 10,000 Readings Taught Me About People Who Don't Believe

Old library with candlelight on open esoteric texts, dust motes visible in the beam

Mysticism: True, False, or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?