The Next Altar: Interspirituality and the Future of the Human Soul

By Christopher Shaw, LCSW-S CSAT-S RYT

Founder, Merkaba Temple & Merkaba Retreats

Co-Founder, ArcherShaw

Something is stirring in the human soul. Not a crisis of faith...a crisis of container. Millions of people carry a genuine, burning spiritual life inside them, and yet find themselves standing outside every door, unable to fit through frames built for someone else’s century.

The Breaking

There is a particular kind of loneliness that no one talks about enough: the loneliness of the spiritually unhoused.

These are not people who have abandoned depth. They are people who have outgrown the vessels that once held it. They have prayed in churches and found something real, then found something real in a Zen sitting, then in the Upanishads, then in the silence between all of it, and now no single tradition can contain what they have become.

I know this loneliness from the inside.

I grew up inside the Methodist church. My mother was the organist, and the sanctuary was essentially my second home. I sang solos from a young age, toured Europe with the United Methodist Festival Choir, poured myself into youth group with everything I had. And even then, I knew something didn’t fit.

I never believed God lived outside of me. I never believed Jesus was the only door.

I was drawn to mysticism, to other religions, to the quiet certainty that the sacred was larger than any single story told about it.

At 14, I knew I was gay. At 17, while singing in a Baptist youth choir, my sexual orientation was discovered.

One hundred and fifty people turned their backs on me - literally - and the choir director offered me conversion therapy. I told him no, walked out, and left the institutional church for good.

What I did not leave was the hunger.

That hunger followed me for decades - through addiction, through recovery in 2008, through the slow construction of a spiritual life assembled from recovery rooms and mystical texts and practice. Through a collapsed marriage. Through relapse. Through an engagement I called off because something inside me kept saying: this is not true.

It followed me into the darkest season of my life, the mid-life crisis - spiritually exhausted, psychically empty, dying inside.

In May 2024, I broke open in a parking lot in San Antonio, collapsed into my best friend’s arms, and finally said the truth out loud.

What followed was a radical stripping of my life: I came off every medication I was taking and I was taking lots, quit vaping, worked my recovery program hard and fast, began healing with acupuncture and Chinese Herbs, and in August flew to Mexico - to Nawake Healing Center in the Bay of Banderas - prepared, as I understood it, not to heal but to die.

Ten days of Kambo, Bufo, psilocybin, meditation, daily devotional practices, and brotherhood, the man I had been performing for 47 years was gone.

What stood up in his place was not improved. It was free.

I tell you this not because my story is exceptional, but because it is not.

The details differ, the choir, the addiction, the pilgrimage, the awakening, the founding of Merkaba Temple, but the arc is the same: a genuine soul pressing against containers that were never built to hold it, breaking open until something larger can emerge.

What looks like dissolution is almost always evolution. What looks like the end of faith is almost always faith insisting on more room.

The old containers are not failing because people have lost faith. They are cracking because consciousness is pressing outward. And containers, by definition, cannot grow.

The Pattern

Human spiritual history is not a flat line. It is a spiral, each movement metabolizing what came before and reaching toward something larger.

Animism taught us the world was alive. Polytheism gave faces to the sacred. Monotheism unified those faces into one source. Secular humanism located the sacred within the human being.

Each was radical in its time. Each was resisted. Each became the ground for what came next.

We are not abandoning the sacred. We are refusing to let any single tradition own it.

That is not relativism.

That is recognition.

The pattern is clear: the arc of spiritual evolution bends toward greater inclusivity of consciousness. Not toward sameness — toward capacity.

More mystery.

More paradox.

More of the real.

Interspirituality is the next movement in this spiral.

It does not claim all paths are the same. They are not.

It asks something far more demanding: that the divine is too vast to be captured by any one path, and that a mature spiritual life requires the capacity to stand in that vastness with humility rather than fear.

What It Actually Looks Like

Interspirituality is frequently misunderstood.

It is not spiritual tourism.

It is not aesthetic borrowing.

It is not sampling traditions without roots.

That is not evolution.

That is consumption.

Genuine interspiritual practice is rigorous. It requires depth — not width. It asks you to go far enough into your own path that you encounter the current beneath all paths.

The Shaivite philosophers of Kashmir called this Spanda — the living pulse of consciousness that underlies every form.

You cannot encounter that by skimming.

You have to descend.

This is what I witness every week at Merkaba Temple. People arrive from radically different directions: recovering addicts who found God in AA, practitioners of Kundalini and Shaivism, former evangelicals shedding shame, agnostics carrying a quiet spiritual hunger they’ve never had language for.

On paper, they should have nothing in common. In practice, the conversations go deep almost immediately.

The reason is simple: Depth does not divide.

When two people have each gone far enough - when life has broken them open and they turned toward it - they recognize each other instantly.

Not belief.

Not language.

Recognition.

I have watched a Southern Baptist deacon and a practicing Shaivite sit together in silence after ceremony, both in tears, with nothing to explain and everything understood.

Different paths. Same water.

This is what interspiritual community looks like with integrity: Not a negotiation between traditions, but a gathering of people who have gone deep enough to know the well is one.

Why Now

Why is this emerging now?

Because the cost of fragmentation has become too high.

We are living through a crisis — political, ecological, social — that is forcing humanity to confront something we have long avoided: Tribalism is not a feature. It is a bug.

And every system built on “our truth versus your truth” is part of the problem.

We are not facing a crisis of belief. We are facing the consequences of identities built on separation.

Spirituality has not been immune to this. In many cases, it has fueled it. The divine has been used to divide, exclude, and justify harm so many times that millions have walked away, not from God, but from what has been done in God’s name.

Interspirituality is not just an evolution of practice. It is a form of cultural repair. It refuses to let the sacred be used as a boundary. It insists that the ground beneath us is shared — and that ignoring this is no longer viable. And it’s not optional anymore.

The Invitation

I want to speak directly to those who feel this:

You who have sat in services that no longer speak to you.

You who have had real, undeniable experiences that no tradition gave language for.

You who have been undone by silence, by beauty, by something you cannot name.

You are not spiritually homeless.

You are spiritually early.

The tradition you belong to has not been fully named yet.

Its temples are already being built — not always in structures, but in the quiet recognition between people who meet across difference and know: this is real.

The mystics have always known this.

Rumi’s reed mourns not a place, but the forgetting of the source. Abhinavagupta described consciousness delighting in its own multiplicity. The Quaker speaks of the inner light. The Sufi speaks of the Beloved. The non-dualist speaks of awareness knowing itself.

Different language. Same direction.

We are living in a moment where that direction can no longer be contained in separate rooms.

The walls are coming down, not to create confusion, but to reveal what was always there:

A single, unbroken light, expressing itself through every form that has ever been called holy.

The boy who was turned away by 150 people in a Baptist church built a temple that turns no one away.

That is not biography.

That is the movement of the sacred.

The next altar is not a building.

It is not owned.

It cannot be defended.

It has no borders.

It is the place where two people, shaped by completely different paths, look at each other and recognize — without doctrine, without explanation —that they have been drinking from the same source all along.

That altar already exists.

It always has.

We are only now learning to gather there.

Christopher Shaw works at the level of identity, nervous system, and embodied authority — the deeper architecture beneath behavior, performance, and strategy. His work serves founders, executives, couples, and leadership teams who are no longer interested in performing strength, managing image, or outsourcing their power, and are ready to stand in coherence.

With more than 18 years of experience in depth psychotherapy, somatic practice, and identity reconstruction, Christopher guides clients through the stabilization and reorganization of their inner architecture. In his work, masculinity and femininity, leadership, and relational presence are not techniques or personas — they are internal structures that reassert themselves through truth, integrity, and responsibility.

His process is initiatory by nature. It supports sovereignty, emotional steadiness under pressure, and the return to an authority that is inherent — not taught, borrowed, or inherited.

This is the path back to the Self that can actually lead.