By Doug Scott

The Evolution of Consciousness and Contemporary Religious Movements: Understanding the Meaning Crisis

Introduction

Contemporary Western society faces a profound crisis of meaning that emerges from the complex evolution of human consciousness through various historical stages. This crisis has contributed to a surge in religious conversion, particularly to Christianity, among public intellectuals, artists, and cultural figures. However, this religious revival often manifests as what scholars term “mimetic Christianity” – an instrumental approach to religion that can feed into Christian Nationalism. Understanding this phenomenon requires examining both the developmental trajectory of human consciousness and the role of collective psychological forces like the Great BASH (Bellicose Attitude, Aggressive Actions, Scarred and Scared, Hope through Hostility).

The Evolution of Consciousness and Meaning-Making

Human consciousness and meaning-making systems have evolved through distinct stages, each offering different ways of understanding reality and creating purpose. The pre-modern consciousness experienced reality through magical and mythical thinking, with individuals deeply embedded within nature and cosmic forces. This provided a profound sense of belonging, though it came with fears of capricious natural and supernatural forces.

Traditional consciousness emerged with agricultural civilization and organized religion, introducing hierarchical social structures and formal moral codes. These systems provided comprehensive metaphysical narratives that explained humanity’s place in the cosmos. While offering clear meaning and purpose, traditional consciousness restricted individual expression and inquiry.

Modern consciousness, born from the Enlightenment, emphasized rational inquiry and individual autonomy. This stage promised liberation through scientific progress but began eroding traditional sources of meaning and community. The resulting “disenchantment of the world” created conditions for alienation despite material advancement.

Post-modern consciousness emerged as a critique of modernist assumptions, highlighting how knowledge and values are shaped by power relations and cultural context. While offering valuable insights about the constructed nature of social reality, post-modernism’s radical skepticism created its own crisis by undermining all stable sources of meaning.

The Contemporary Crisis and the Great BASH

The current global meaning crisis stems from this historical development, particularly the inability of post-modern deconstruction to provide coherent narratives and communities necessary for human flourishing. This vacuum creates conditions where the Great BASH, a collective bellicosity thoughtform fueled by fear, aggression, and unprocessed trauma, can powerfully influence social and religious movements.

The Great BASH represents a powerful psychic egregore – a collectively generated thought-form that takes on a life of its own, influencing human behavior and social dynamics. This thoughtform emerges from humanity’s inefficient processing of catalysts and persistent blockages in the lower energy centers or chakras. Understanding the Great BASH requires examining its core components and how they interact with human consciousness and social movements.

The term BASH encapsulates four interconnected elements that characterize this collective thoughtform.

A Bellicose Attitude forms its foundation – a pervasive worldview that approaches life through the lens of conflict and battle. This attitude sees every interaction as a potential threat or competition, creating a state of constant vigilance and readiness for confrontation. In religious movements, this often manifests as a sense of spiritual warfare or cultural battle against perceived enemies of the faith.

Aggressive Actions follow naturally from this bellicose mindset. The thoughtform drives individuals and groups toward dominating and controlling others, often through force or intimidation rather than dialogue and understanding. These actions can range from verbal attacks and social ostracism to institutional discrimination and physical violence. In religious contexts, this might appear as attempts to impose beliefs through political power or coercive means.

The Scarred and Scared component acknowledges the role of collective and individual trauma in perpetuating aggressive behavior. Past wounds, whether personal or historical, create deep-seated fears that fuel defensive and hostile responses to perceived threats. This aspect of the Great BASH helps explain why traumatized populations often become vectors for aggressive ideologies and movements.

Hope through Hostility represents perhaps the most insidious aspect of the thoughtform – the belief that violence or domination can somehow lead to positive transformation. This “myth of redemptive violence” suggests that if we can just defeat or control the right enemies, a better world will emerge. This belief helps justify aggressive actions while providing a sense of moral purpose to bellicose behavior.

The Great BASH operates primarily through activation of the lower chakras or energy centers. The root chakra, associated with survival and security, becomes distorted by fear and scarcity thinking. The sacral chakra, connected to emotional expression and relationships, manifests blockages through aggressive and manipulative behavior. The solar plexus chakra, relating to personal power and will, becomes distorted through domination and control dynamics.

These lower chakra blockages create resonant fields that can affect large groups of people, particularly during times of social stress or uncertainty. The thoughtform feeds on and amplifies these energetic distortions, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of fear, aggression, and trauma. This helps explain why aggressive movements can spread rapidly through populations, especially when existing social structures and meaning-making systems are breaking down.

The Great BASH’s relationship with religious movements deserves particular attention, as spiritual traditions can either amplify or help transcend its influence. Religious institutions and beliefs possess tremendous power to shape human consciousness and behavior. When influenced by the Great BASH, religious movements often exhibit several characteristic patterns:

First, they tend to emphasize apocalyptic narratives that amplify fear and urgency. These narratives frame current events as part of a cosmic battle between good and evil, with the movement’s adherents cast as righteous warriors fighting against dark forces. This framing activates and intensifies survival fears while justifying aggressive actions against perceived enemies.

Second, religious movements under the Great BASH’s influence often develop rigid hierarchical structures based on dominance and control. Leaders maintain power through fear, shame, and promises of special knowledge or divine favor. This mirrors the thoughtform’s emphasis on power dynamics and its exploitation of human insecurity.

Third, these movements frequently promote black-and-white thinking that divides the world into absolute categories of good and evil, saved and damned, us and them. This polarized worldview makes it difficult for adherents to recognize nuance or find common ground with those who hold different beliefs. The resulting isolation further strengthens the thoughtform’s influence.

Fourth, such movements often appropriate religious symbols and teachings to justify violence or oppression. Sacred texts get interpreted through the lens of bellicosity, emphasizing passages about warfare and judgment while downplaying messages of love, mercy, and universal compassion. This selective interpretation helps maintain the aggressive energy that feeds the thoughtform.

However, religious and spiritual traditions also contain powerful resources for transcending the Great BASH’s influence. The path toward transformation involves several key elements:

Conscious awareness forms the foundation for change. This means developing the ability to recognize how the Great BASH operates in our own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Spiritual practices like meditation, contemplative prayer, and self-examination can help cultivate this awareness. These practices allow us to observe our reactions without immediately acting on them, creating space for more conscious choices.

Emotional integration plays a crucial role in transformation. Many spiritual traditions offer practices for working with difficult emotions like fear, anger, and grief. Rather than suppressing these emotions or acting them out, these practices help us hold them with compassion and understanding. This integration helps heal the trauma that fuels the Great BASH.

Community support provides essential containment for transformation. Healthy spiritual communities can offer spaces where people feel safe enough to be vulnerable and work through their fears and wounds. These communities model different ways of handling conflict and create environments where people can experience belonging without requiring enemy figures to unite against.

Activation of higher chakras helps balance and transform the distorted energies of the lower centers. Spiritual practices that cultivate compassion, understanding, and wisdom can help shift consciousness beyond the survival-oriented focus of the Great BASH. This involves developing the heart chakra’s capacity for universal love and the throat chakra’s ability to speak truth with kindness.

Shadow work represents another crucial aspect of transformation. This involves consciously engaging with the denied or rejected aspects of ourselves that the Great BASH exploits. Religious traditions often provide frameworks and practices for this work, helping people acknowledge their capacity for both good and evil while choosing more conscious ways of being.

The development of discernment allows individuals and communities to distinguish between authentic spiritual impulses and the distorted expressions that feed the Great BASH. This involves learning to recognize the different qualities of energy and motivation behind religious expressions. True spiritual development tends to increase love, wisdom, and inclusion, while the Great BASH promotes fear, division, and exclusion.

Ultimately, transcending the Great BASH’s influence requires a commitment to ongoing transformation at both individual and collective levels. Religious traditions can support this transformation when they emphasize practices that develop self-awareness, emotional integration, and compassion. The challenge lies in reclaiming the transformative power of spiritual traditions while avoiding their potential misuse as vehicles for collective bellicosity.

Christian Nationalism as a Response to the Meaning Crisis

Christian Nationalism represents a particular manifestation of both developmental regression and the Great BASH’s influence. It attempts to address the meaning crisis by returning to traditional consciousness while incorporating modern political structures and post-modern media techniques. However, this approach typically amplifies rather than resolves the underlying issues.

The movement reflects the four components of the Great BASH:

First, it adopts a bellicose attitude, viewing society through the lens of spiritual warfare and cultural battle. This creates a perpetual state of conflict between “true believers” and perceived enemies of the faith.

Second, it promotes aggressive actions, advocating for the forceful imposition of Christian values through political power rather than persuasion and dialogue.

Third, it exploits collective trauma and fears about the loss of traditional values and social status, with these unhealed wounds fueling aggressive responses to perceived threats.

Fourth, it promotes hope through hostility, suggesting that societal salvation comes through defeating and controlling opposing groups rather than through spiritual transformation and reconciliation.

The Metamodern Alternative

Metamodernism offers a potential path forward by attempting to transcend the limitations of both modern and post-modern consciousness. This emerging perspective seeks to reconstruct meaning while maintaining awareness of its constructed nature. It tries to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously – embracing progress while honoring tradition, pursuing truth while acknowledging its complexity.

When applied to religious expression, metamodern consciousness could help develop forms of spirituality that:

Integrate pre-modern wisdom about community and sacred meaning with modern values of individual rights and rational inquiry.

Maintain awareness of post-modern insights about plurality and context while still affirming the possibility of genuine meaning and truth.

Address the psychological and spiritual needs that drive people toward Christian Nationalism without falling into its exclusionary and aggressive patterns.

Breaking Free from the Great BASH

Addressing the meaning crisis and its manifestations in movements like Christian Nationalism requires understanding how the Great BASH operates through developmental stages and developing strategies to transcend its influence. This involves:

The conscious processing of individual and collective trauma that fuels bellicose attitudes and aggressive actions. This includes acknowledging historical wounds while refusing to use them as justification for further harm.

The development of self-awareness about how the Great BASH operates through our own thoughts, emotions, and actions. This includes recognizing when religious or political views are being shaped by fear and aggression rather than love and wisdom.

The activation of higher chakras to move beyond the lower chakra blockages that make individuals susceptible to regressive religious and political movements.

Conclusion

The contemporary meaning crisis emerges from the complex evolution of human consciousness and its interaction with collective psychological forces like the Great BASH. Understanding this helps illuminate why many retreat into Christian Nationalism and similar movements that promise certainty and belonging but often manifest as aggressive and exclusionary.

Moving forward requires developing more sophisticated ways of making meaning that can honor both unity and diversity, tradition and progress, individual and community. This involves cultivating forms of religious and cultural life that can provide authentic meaning while resisting the pull of collective bellicosity and authoritarian control.

The challenge ahead lies in fostering religious expressions that serve genuine spiritual development rather than feeding collective fear and aggression. This involves maintaining a delicate balance between honoring traditional wisdom and promoting inclusive, transformative approaches to faith that can heal rather than exploit our collective wounds. The metamodern perspective, combined with awareness of how to transcend the Great BASH, offers promising directions for this crucial work.

• Cosmic Christ