Spiritual but not religious: the culture of personal transformation

Abstract

This study analyzes the development of a culture of personal transformation in contemporary societies, showing its forms and orientations, and pointing to the factors that favor its development. This new culture unifies psychology and spirituality, emphasizes the transformational power of the experience of transcendence, and flourishes in an heterogeneous and loosely organized milieu driven by trends toward individualization and hybridization. The interpretative hypothesis is that this cultural development is a response to a societal change at the level of the individual: the expansion of the self. The culture of personal transformation can be explained as a response to the existential turmoil that is inherent to the expansion of the self.