We are living through a profound transformation of life and perception—driven by digitalization, algorithmic automation, and artificial intelligence. As with earlier technological upheavals, these shifts have brought about widespread anxiety, disorientation, and a renewed sense of alienation. The global resurgence of nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism is one symptom of this deeper unease. In response, many contemporary artists are turning—once again—to mysticism, spirituality, and nonhuman ways of knowing to make sense of the present.

At some point this spring, I started to add the quasi-philosophical question: What exactly is the difference between an ending and a beginning? I asked this because I’d like to know. I was curious what in my clients’ lives was arriving with any insight, distinct markers of time changing, feelings of agency. If a portal flings itself open, what propels someone through?

We inhabit a world shaped by spectral interactions mediated through digital screens and networks, in which Derrida’s “technological ghost” has become an everyday reality. The texture of our historical moment is characterized by intimacy at a distance, proximity without physical contact, and instant connectivity devoid of emotional empathy.

Institutional psychotherapy theorized madness as a double estrangement: both mental and social alienation of the self from its “participation in the environment.” Undertaking a Marxist rereading of psychoanalysis, the movement operated via group therapies and a radical restructuring of psychiatric institutions, involving patients in their capacity to actively participate in each other’s healing processes.

In locales outside Blavatsky’s European context, by contrast, a contemporaneous boom in spiritualism and religious sectarianism was to some degree born of the desire to curb Western influence. Rather than form entirely new belief systems, scholars and religious practitioners tended to redefine existing folk spiritual practices in accordance with a nationalism that sought to construct a coherent national identity in opposition to the West. Paradoxically, this effort often vanquished the very folk practices on which that nationalism rested.

She is a being worthy of thanks as she gently carries grieving souls to the afterlife with the same devotion with which she saved the parents who abandoned her, the same warmth and compassion with which she soothed the souls she met along the road to the underworld, and with the quiet confidence of having successfully braved a journey into the unknown. Today, Princess Bari is the only salvation and hope for the deceased and the family that loved them.

For Oomoto, learning these arts was a form of active meditation. Drawing from both Shinto ceremonial tradition and Zen Buddhism, Oomoto saw the arts of preparing tea, calligraphy, or aikido as spiritual practices whose aesthetics traced cosmic energies. These arts were acts of purification and offering, ways of becoming one with your surroundings. It’s all about encounter and communion. In the 1970s, these traditional arts came to form the summer seminar curriculum of the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts.

Sound telepathy is a phenomenon that recurs at unexpected junctures in the history of music. A famous—and probably apocryphal—anecdote connects it to Anton Webern and his use of the compositional marking “pensato”: a sound so quiet that it can only be thought by the performer. This note should not be manifested as a wave perceptible by hearing, but as a mental vibration that could be transmitted from one mind to another.

“The fantastic” occupies the boundary between the two, forcing the reader “to hesitate … between a natural interpretation or a supernatural interpretation.” When it is impossible to decide whether the laws of reality hold or whether new natural laws must be assumed, the hesitation that arises in the absence of complete disbelief or absolute faith is the condition of “the fantastic.”

I read the “non-Western” spiritual beliefs of Sakha through the lens of Western esotericism because I propose that their reinvention is part of a shared late–New Age historical moment. For many people today, esotericism serves as a broad alternative to both empirical science as a hegemonic worldview and the dominant world religions, as well as a way to escape modern imperialism, colonialism, and oppression. Knowledge that resists these tendencies is found not only in non-Western traditions, but also in “pre-modern” Western traditions.

We cannot consider her oeuvre without placing it in the wider context of human consciousness and morality, asking what it means to behold works of art that were created clandestinely for an audience of like-minded believers. Wanting to maintain a position beyond the art market is legitimate. But what does it entail to partake in the public sphere of the mainstream art world, and to actively refrain from it?