ABSTRACT. In this article, I explore (not) belonging from the standpoint of an esotericist working within the academy. By esotericist, I mean someone who works with notions of spirituality in Foucault’s sense of the ‘search, practice and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth,’ in contrast to the more accepted academic concept of philosophy, which can be followed ‘without him having to change or alter his being as subject.’ Spirituality requires askesis: the progressive transformation of the self by long inner labour. Esotericism was long missing from the academy, described as ‘rejected knowledge’ by Hanegraaff and ‘fraudulent bankruptcy’ by Adorno. I explore how it is to work with a spiritual worldview within a largely materialistic academy and how decades of meditative work led me to experience the world in non-standard ways. I use an unpublished poem to illustrate how this can lead to a struggle to find places of engagement within academic settings, adopting the traditional Irish notion of anamchara – a friend of the soul – to report how my soul life is supported within this isolation and how working with such friends, separated by distance and sometimes by time, helps overcome feelings of otherness.

Keywords: esoteric; spirituality; transcendence; consciousness; education

How to cite: Boland, N. (2024). Aloned to assay it: The esoteric(ist) and the academy. Knowledge Cultures, 12(1), 49-69. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc12120244

Received September 11, 2023 • Received in revised form January 5, 2024
Accepted February 23, 2024 • Available online April 1, 2024