Stories that are spiritualizing but don’t look “spiritual”: Part 1

Directional spirituality and heroic, anti-heroic, and tragic story arcs

Apr 05, 2025

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Everyone is seeking God but most don’t know it opened up the matter of what such seeking actually entails. Given that most people don’t think of what they do in their lives as seeking the Divine, it’s reasonable to conclude that the search doesn’t express itself in the same way for everyone, whether in real life or in fiction. Furthermore, given that there are variations, how might they manifest in stories to give motivate and inspire readers to engage in that search, at least in a way that’s relatable and appropriate for them?

a man standing in a cave at sunset — Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

Shifting consciousness (and behavior) through story

As a general framework for this exploration, Everyone is seeking God but most don’t know it identified four broad baseline patterns of human behavior and their associated beliefs about life’s purpose. Let me summarize those patterns again here:

Self-comforters (sensualists): “The purpose of life is to feel good (especially to indulge my senses through food, entertainment, sex, alcohol, drugs, etc.).”
- Seek to avoid pain and experience sensual pleasure or simply comfort, with as little effort as possible. Sense concerns, in other words, override other considerations.
Self-servers (egotists): “The purpose of life is to get mine.”
- Seek to advance themselves in the world through creative self-effort, achievement, and acquisition.
Self-sacrificers (idealists): “The purpose of life is to act nobly and uphold honor.”
- Seek to serve and even sacrifice themselves for others and/or a greater cause, such as improving the world in some way.
Self-transcenders (saints, aspiring or actual): “The purpose of life is God-realization (to know God in the fullest extent).”

I’ll repeat once again that these are “baseline” patterns that represent an individual’s default consciousness rather than general stereotypes. Any person whose behavior most commonly aligns to one of these patterns can, at times, express qualities of any of the other patterns, after which they’ll typically resume their default or predominant behavior. But no one is locked into a pattern. If a person in one pattern chooses, of their own free will, to behave more in attunement with one of the other patterns (up or down), then they’ll eventually shift their default consciousness or baseline behavior to that other pattern.

Even to visualize or engage vicariously in another pattern is effective for making a shift, which is where fiction plays an important role. To read about fictional characters living in another pattern is, to a very real extent, to imagine oneself living in that way, such that reading such stories over time can also affect a shift in behavior and consciousness. And if that shift is to a higher pattern, the move is, in a fundamental sense, something we can call “spiritual.”

Directional spirituality

That shift does not necessarily mean that a person’s life appears any more outwardly “spiritual” than before. They might not be doing anything that seems to express obvious spirituality or aspects of what we can wall a “way of belief”—symbols, rituals, ceremonies, and professed creeds. Some of their actions may even seem highly materialistic. But, if they are in any degree moving away from the level of the self-comforter or materialism and toward that of the self-transcender, then their direction is effectively elevating or spiritualizing, that is, moving toward God, Spirit, Satchidananda, etc. This we can call a way of awakening, which is the same for everyone regardless of outward beliefs and even the absence of beliefs.

To better understand this directional spirituality, and to avoid defining spirituality as some static state of being, it helps to invert the list of patterns in the previous section to place the self-transcender at the top. Again, only the self-transcender seeks “God” explicitly, that is, accepts that the purpose of life is to achieve first conscious communion (an I-Thou relationship) and then mystical oneness (“Thou and I are one”) with the Divine.

An upwards movement toward the level of a self-transcender is spiritualizing because it draws one closer to God and away from materialism.

An upward movement is spiritualizing even it occurs within a single pattern. For example, encouraging a consummate self-server to occasionally think about giving to or serving others (that is, making an occasional sacrifice) is directionally spiritualizing, for its closer to the pattern of the self-sacrificer, if only a by little bit. With continued encouragement and awareness of the greater happiness that comes as a result, self-servers may do more and more along those lines until they transition more into the self-sacrificer pattern.

The reverse is also true: any downward movement in the direction of the self-comforter/sensualist is, from a spiritual point of view, degrading, because it moves away from God and toward materialism.

A downwards movement toward the level of the self-comforter is spiritually degrading because it takes one farther away from God and toward materialism.

Again, a downward movement within a pattern is also degrading. Dedicated self-sacrificers who despair about the effectiveness of their service, and who also fear losing their self-identity by rising toward the self-transcender, may eventually tire of making sacrificers and slide back down into the pattern of the self-server.

Action and visualization reinforce the consciousness of a pattern

Broadly speaking, any given action or attitude resonates with one of the four patterns more than the others. Creative, energetic work for the purpose of personal achievement, for example, aligns most closely with the self-server. (Others can engage in energetic work, of course, but their purpose in doing so is different.) Such work, in other words, energizes the self-server pattern and, consequently, magnetically draws one’s consciousness more to that level.

If someone who is normally living on the self-comforter level engages in such work—again, for the purpose of personal achievement rather than self-comfort—then they’ll be drawn upwards toward the self-server level. For them, such activity is expansive and spiritualizing. For a self-sacrificer to do the same, however, would mean turning away from service to greater cause, which is contractive and degrading for them because they’ll be drawn downwards toward the self-comforter level and away from Spirit.

Psychological studies have clearly shown that that visualizing an action or activity, which is to say, vicarious experience, can be just as effective as doing those actions directly. Because reading fiction engages the imagination and allows one to share in the outer and inner experience of another, stories are a powerful means of such visualization. Reading about fictional characters living in another pattern is, to a very real extent, to imagine oneself living in that way, which can thus also affect a shift in consciousness.

If that shift is to a higher pattern, then the story is, for that reader, spiritualizing; if the shift is to a lower pattern, the story is, for that reader, degrading.

Heroic, anti-heroic, and tragic story arcs

In fiction, the spiritualizing and degrading directionalities are reflected in different character arcs.

A heroic arc is one in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles to achieve something that he or she didn’t initially think possible. They’ve grown in some capacity, which is to say, they’ve discovered that there’s something more to who and what they are than they believed at the outset. Such discovery—the upward movement toward greater realization of one’s true essence as a soul—is the same for a drug addict who learns to integrate with mainstream society, a selfish businessperson who learns to serve others, or a righteous moral champion who learns self-forgetfulness.

The upward, spiritualizing movement in this model applies whether or not the story contains any obvious or explicit spiritual content or context, or even whether it tries to do so symbolically. Setting a story within a church or a monastery doesn’t make a story “spiritual” any more than the setting of a crime den in itself makes a story degrading. Similarly, a story in which a self-server goes through all the proper motions of religion but treats God as nothing more than a means to achieve greater power over others is not a spiritual or spiritualizing story.

We might call such an arc anti-heroic because it moves in the downward direction away from the self-transcender and toward the self-comforter. Just as the protagonist of a heroic arc grows in some capacity, the anti-heroic protagonist shrinks by burying part of their soul essence underneath increasingly darker and denser layers of ignorance and egotism. And just as a spiritualizing story need not wear any outward spiritual garb, a degrading story, again, can yet be clothed in raiments of apparent holiness.

We find such a dichotomy with the incongruence of “Christian” heavy metal music, which attempts to offset the downward-pull of the music’s inherent style with a superficial (and often unintelligible) glazing of lyrics that occasionally mention Jesus. A great deal of “New Age” fiction, similarly, like many “New Age” teachings in general, suffers the same disconnect. Although such stories often espouse seemingly “spiritual” concepts—on occasion also claiming some new revelation—the effect is usually not one of inspiring the reader toward self-transcendence and greater devotion to God but rather strengthening a reader’s egotism and pride. Claiming a new revelation, in fact, is one of the more common tropes of this genre, which seems to have no purpose other than to give the reader a sense of elitism for having been smart enough to have read the book.

James Redfield’s “novel,” The Celestine Prophecy, for example, is centered on an ancient and fictional manuscript of nine astounding “Insights.” The story’s characters (who lack agency, by the way, as stuff generally just happens to them), of course have access to the actual insights and talk about them at length, but they never reveal them to the reader. You (the reader) apparently have to discover them for yourself, which you can do by buying study guides, signing up for Redfield’s online courses, taking advantage of his counseling services, and buying the sequel books about the Tenth and Eleventh Insights. As such, The Celestine Prophecy is less a novel and more a sales brochure.1

So, again, what we call a heroic arc is spiritualizing in that a character grows toward self-transcendence and an anti-heroic arc is degrading in that a character shrinks toward materialism. We’ll see these directions in more detail in subsequent posts that explore the transitions between levels.

What, then, about a tragic character arc? On the surface, it may appear that a tragic character is on a downward, anti-heroic arc, but there’s a critical distinction. An anti-heroic story glorifies degrading choices and thus reinforces such attitudes in the reader. A tragic story, on the other hand, demonstrates the awfulness of certain choices on the protagonist’s part to such an extent that the reader (or audience in the case of plays) thinks, “Egads, I never want to end up in that place myself!” Oftentimes, when reading a tragedy, you want to shout at the protagonist to say, “No! No! Don’t go there!” as with the twisted reasoning that Shakepeare’s Othello uses to justify murdering his own (innocent) wife, Desdemona in Act 5, Scene 2:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars.
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore
Should I repent me. But once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have plucked the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It needs must wither. I’ll smell it on the tree.
O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! More, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee
And love thee after. One more, and ⟨this⟩ the last.
So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears. This sorrow’s heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.

*Desdemona and Othello*, by Antonio Muñoz Degrain, 1880

A fictional tragedy is a kind of risk-free practice session. It provides readers a space in which to feel the consequences of bad choices—and thus to learn and grow from them, which is upwards—without having to actually go through the experience and possibly hurt others in the process. The utter repulsion inspires readers with the resolve to make different decisions when pressed by similar circumstances.

A proper tragedy, through a complete negation of the negatives, thus carries the reader on a heroic, spiritualizing, arc even though the protagonist goes through a tragic, degrading arc.

Coming up in part 2

In the next post, we’ll continue with a look at how the behavioral patterns map to general domains of themes within fiction.

Until then, your comments are welcome.