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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

From Metaphysics
to Deep Time

My Journey to a Secular Spirituality

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

For much of my life I was immersed in grand spiritual worldviews. As a young seeker I explored Theosophy, drawn to its intricate maps of hidden planes, cycles of evolution, and cosmic hierarchies. Later, Osho's charismatic presence and iconoclastic teachings drew me in, promising liberation from dogma. Ken Wilber's Integral Theory then offered what seemed like a master key—a vast architecture that could unify science, psychology, and spirituality.

Yet over time, each of these systems began to show its cracks. The grand patterns didn't quite hold up under closer scrutiny; the cosmologies were dazzling but untestable. And perhaps most importantly, I found that my own sense of awe, curiosity, and ethical commitment didn't depend on these metaphysical superstructures. Gradually, and sometimes painfully, I shed layer after layer of belief until I emerged into a worldview that is both secular and deeply human—a home I call secular humanism.

Friends who remain inside those systems sometimes tell me “You don't get it.” But I think I do get it; I simply no longer need it. What I have found in its place is not a barren materialism but a vibrant, grounded form of spirituality rooted in evolution, geology, and the astonishing creativity of the natural world.

The Allure and Limits of Grand Maps

Looking back, I see a consistent pattern. Each system promised a “total view”—a way to reconcile science and spirit, body and soul, personal growth and cosmic destiny. Theosophy gave me a complex evolutionary mythology of rounds and root races. Osho offered an experiential laboratory for transcending the mind. Wilber assembled a four-quadrant scaffolding meant to explain everything from atoms to angels.

These maps thrilled me intellectually. They offered meaning on a cosmic scale. But they also discouraged critical inquiry. When evidence didn't fit, the gap was filled with mystical authority or “higher knowledge.” Over time, the dissonance grew too loud to ignore. My training in science and my passion for empirical evidence clashed with the metaphysical claims I was asked to accept.

The Turn Toward Secular Humanism

Secular humanism didn't arrive for me as a single conversion moment but as an accumulation of doubts followed by a reawakening of curiosity. Once I stopped trying to fit reality into someone else's metaphysical model, I could look at the universe directly. Evolution and geology became my new sacred texts. The deep time of Earth's history, the branching tree of life, the interlocking systems of plate tectonics and climate—all of it offered a story grander than anything I had read in esoteric books, and crucially, it was real.

Where once I had sought transcendence through meditation or mystical ascent, I began to find it in the fossil record, in evolutionary biology, in the night sky. This is not a demotion of spirituality but a transformation of it.

Awe as a Secular Practice

Even without a belief in higher planes, awe remains central to my life. When I hold a trilobite fossil in my hand, I'm touching a creature that lived half a billion years ago. When I read about the first microbial life emerging in ancient seas, I see the slow artistry of evolution sculpting novelty out of chaos. This sense of connection across time and space humbles me more deeply than any metaphysical hierarchy ever did.

Awe, in this context, isn't about feeling small before a deity but about recognizing our embeddedness in a universe of staggering complexity. It's an invitation to curiosity, reverence, and care—all the qualities once attributed to “spirit,” now reclaimed as human capacities.

Transcendence Without Metaphysics

Traditional spirituality frames transcendence as rising above the material world. My secular spirituality reframes it as stepping outside the narrow confines of ego and habit. I can experience transcendence in many ways: hiking through an ancient canyon, getting absorbed in a scientific book, losing myself in music, or having a deep, empathic conversation. Meditation still works, but as a tool for awareness rather than a portal to a higher realm.

This shift has made me more appreciative of everyday life. Instead of seeing the physical as a lower level to escape, I see it as the only level we know—and it's plenty mysterious.

Ethics From the Ground Up

Another revelation has been how ethics look when detached from metaphysical authority. Without cosmic punishment or karmic tallies, moral responsibility feels more immediate. We act not because of hidden cosmic rules but because our actions affect living beings here and now. Empathy and evidence guide me more than doctrine. The moral conversation becomes an evolving, collective project rather than a handed-down command.

Far from diminishing ethics, this grounding strengthens them. It asks me to take ownership of my choices rather than outsourcing them to invisible forces.

Community Without Creed

Leaving metaphysical systems can feel lonely. Yet it has also opened me to new forms of community—science clubs, online forums, volunteer organizations, and skeptical discussion groups. These spaces allow for ritual and celebration (birthdays, milestones, seasonal events) without requiring belief in hidden worlds. It turns out that belonging is a human need, not a religious one.

Meaning as Creation

When I was immersed in Theosophy or Integral Theory, meaning felt prewritten—we were actors in a cosmic drama. In a secular frame, meaning is something we co-create. This realization is liberating: life is not about decoding an existing script but about writing our own stories. Love, art, friendship, and inquiry become sacred acts not because they echo a higher plane but because they are expressions of our finite, precious existence.

Responding to “You Don't Get It”

When old friends tell me I “don't get it,” I smile. I understand their systems well; I've lived them. But I've learned that the deepest satisfactions those systems promised—awe, purpose, ethics, community—do not require belief in hidden dimensions. In fact, shedding the metaphysical overlay has made those satisfactions more immediate, more honest.

My response is often gentle: “I do get it—I just see it differently now.” This shifts the conversation from ignorance to interpretation, opening the possibility of mutual respect.

Reclaiming “Spirit”

For me, “spirit” now means vitality, courage, generosity, and curiosity. It's not something hovering above the material world but something embodied in it—in our neurons, in our ecosystems, in our shared human project. This reframing allows me to keep the poetry of spiritual language while grounding it in experience.

Sailing: My Greatest Passion

Of all the pursuits that have shaped my life, sailing stands apart. Long before I shed my metaphysical frameworks, I had already discovered the raw, immediate intimacy with nature that sailing provides. On the water there is no guru, no hidden plane, no theory to hide behind. There is only wind, tide, and hull—and your own capacity to read and respond.

Sailing taught me to respect nature's moods and to work with, rather than against, its forces. A sudden gust, a shifting current, a brewing squall—each demands attentiveness, humility, and skill. When you are trimming a sail or adjusting your course, you're not imposing your will on nature; you're aligning yourself with something larger, something real. This dynamic dialogue with wind and water proved more fulfilling than any spiritual discipline I had practiced.

Out on the water, away from shore, I found the same qualities I had once sought in meditation: stillness, focus, and a dissolving of the ego into a larger field of being. But unlike the promise of transcendent states, sailing gave me this experience through direct, embodied action. It grounded me in a tangible world—weather, geography, physics—while also evoking a timeless awe.

Sailing has also connected me to deep time in a different way. I'm participating in a practice as old as humanity. When I read the clouds or feel the temperature drop before a storm, I'm aligning with patterns that predate all our mythologies. In this way, sailing has become my truest spiritual practice—not because it takes me out of the world, but because it brings me fully into it.

Conclusion: A Spacious Humanism

The journey from metaphysics to secular humanism has not been a loss but an opening. By releasing elaborate cosmologies, I've gained a direct encounter with the universe as it is. Evolution and geology, far from being dry sciences, have become my portals to awe. Ethics have become more immediate. Community has become freer. Meaning has become something I shape rather than something imposed.

This is what a “spiritual” life looks like for me now: no hidden planes, no cosmic hierarchies, but a world shimmering with significance precisely because it is real, shared, and finite. In its way, it is every bit as profound as any mystical path—not because it denies transcendence, but because it locates transcendence in the here and now.