Full Project Description:

Ascension & Digital Spirituality investigates contemporary spiritual communities organized around the promise of personal, collective, and planetary transformation. Across livestreams, social media posts, online courses, retreats, ceremonies, subscription groups, and private healing sessions, spiritual creators describe humanity as moving into a higher dimension of consciousness. Participants may understand themselves as starseeds, lightworkers, Pleiadians, Atlanteans, Lemurians, or multidimensional beings who have incarnated on Earth to assist with this transition.

These identities organize biography on a cosmic scale. Feelings of alienation, sensitivity, illness, intuition, or social difference can be reinterpreted as evidence of an extraterrestrial origin, a prior incarnation in an ancient civilization, or a spiritual mission extending beyond the present lifetime. Narratives of Atlantis and Lemuria offer imagined genealogies of lost wisdom, while Pleiadian and other starseed identities locate the self within extraterrestrial lineages of healing and planetary service. Practices such as channeling and “light language” allow creators to present the body and voice as instruments through which knowledge from higher-dimensional beings, galactic councils, or divine sources enters the world.

The project is anchored by ongoing research on Love Has Won and its successor community, 5D Full Disclosure. Love Has Won developed an elaborate cosmology around ascension, divine embodiment, galactic beings, reincarnated historical figures, and the spiritual authority of Amy Carlson, who was known within the group as Mother God. Following Carlson’s death, 5D Full Disclosure continued and reconfigured elements of this cosmological world through livestreams, teachings, healing practices, and an ongoing digital community. Studying this transition makes it possible to examine how charismatic authority survives rupture, how followers reorganize revelation after the loss of a central leader, and how digital infrastructures preserve and transform spiritual worlds.

Love Has Won and 5D Full Disclosure are situated here within a broader ecosystem rather than treated as wholly isolated or exceptional. Online spiritual teachers, ascension coaches, channelers, energy healers, retreat leaders, and lifestyle influencers frequently operate through similar media forms. They cultivate intimacy by speaking directly into followers’ phones, sharing personal revelations, offering individualized access, and inviting audiences into private groups or events. Authority is built through a combination of charisma, authenticity, emotional availability, spiritual expertise, and the promise that followers can participate directly in extraordinary transformations.

The project asks what happens when revelation is organized through the economic structures of influencer culture. Spiritual knowledge may be offered through memberships, readings, activations, ceremonies, coaching packages, healing sessions, retreats, merchandise, and premium access to the teacher. Intimacy becomes both a mode of community formation and a commodity. The spiritual leader can appear simultaneously as prophet, healer, friend, entrepreneur, celebrity, and brand.

This commercial dimension is inseparable from questions of race, class, mobility, and access. Many highly visible participants in these digital spiritual markets are white, middle-class women whose economic and geographic mobility allows them to travel, attend retreats, develop online brands, and convert spiritual experience into professional authority. The project examines how practices, symbols, and claims associated with Indigenous, Asian, African diasporic, and Latin American traditions are detached from the communities and histories that sustain them and repackaged as universally available tools of personal transformation.

Ayahuasca tourism offers one especially important example. Retreats in Peru and elsewhere may be marketed to affluent international participants as routes to healing, awakening, authenticity, or spiritual rebirth. Within influencer culture, participation can become evidence of depth and legitimacy that later supports paid coaching, content creation, retreat leadership, or other forms of spiritual entrepreneurship. The project asks who is able to travel in search of transformation, who performs the labor that makes these experiences possible, whose traditions become marketable, and who ultimately receives authority and profit from their circulation.

This analysis does not treat every form of spiritual borrowing, retreat participation, or ascension belief as equivalent. Instead, it attends to the unequal structures through which spiritual practices travel. Whiteness and middle-class mobility can function as forms of invisible infrastructure, allowing some seekers to move between traditions, locations, and identities while presenting that movement as individual freedom or divine calling. Practices rooted in specific lands and communities may then be reframed through universal languages of vibration, energy, consciousness, and human evolution that obscure histories of colonialism, extraction, and religious difference.

The project also examines the significance of femininity within these worlds. Divine feminine discourse can authorize forms of spiritual leadership, bodily knowledge, emotional expression, sexuality, and entrepreneurial self-making that participants experience as alternatives to patriarchal religious institutions. At the same time, these ideals may reproduce racialized images of feminine purity, naturalness, beauty, motherhood, and intuitive authority. The highly visible spiritual woman becomes both an embodiment of transcendence and a carefully mediated aspirational figure.

Across these cases, digital platforms do more than transmit preexisting beliefs. They shape the form that revelation takes. Livestreaming creates immediacy; social media rewards visual coherence and continual disclosure; subscription communities establish degrees of access; and algorithmic circulation places ascension teachings alongside wellness content, conspiracy narratives, manifestation discourse, alternative medicine, and political spirituality. The resulting spiritual worlds are fluid and interconnected, allowing people to move among starseed identity, goddess spirituality, psychedelic healing, conspiratorial cosmology, and, in some cases, evangelical Christianity.

Ascension & Digital Spirituality therefore studies contemporary spirituality as a field of mediated relationships: relationships among bodies and technologies, teachers and followers, commerce and intimacy, sacred knowledge and colonial histories, personal transformation and planetary crisis. It asks how cosmic identities become emotionally persuasive, how digital communities sustain charismatic worlds, and how the promise of ascension can conceal the material inequalities through which transcendence is accessed, performed, and sold.