2026.07.02 | Scattered thoughts on Discord as the antithesis of what spiritual communities need, and a negative overall to the blooming of spiritual arts.
More and more I see blogs disappear with links to Discord communities showing where they left to; more and more I see the vanishing of information into black holes that only seem to worsen the state of spiritual learning nowadays. I have thoughts on it.
The pros of using Discord for spiritual communities:
Community focused on one thing:
While tags may be flooded with unrelated posts, and independent websites are for reading only, Discord allows niche topics to be explored. Not only that, but they encourage opinions and perspectives to be shared, including those of people who wouldn't otherwise have the guts to and/or think they were worth listening to when it comes to writing a permanent comment on a website.
Proper cultivation of discussions:
There may be a subreddit for everything you could imagine, but a Discord allows the separation of a subject into not just topics, but places for chatting about specific things, sending resources, and so on in such a way that it becomes its own hub of information in ways more public social media can't match. Forums, threads, replies, pins, channels for reposting important information; these all go a long way in taking conversations from surface-level and often repetitive posts into in-depth discussions.
Posting online comes with the risk of being harassed, hounded, stalked, etc. Positing spiritual views online is especially at risk, when you post on a platform like this there's always the risk you'll cross the dashboard of someone virulently aggressive and self-entitled or otherwise ready to take out feelings on you, and there are no moderators you can ask to step in, and no social consequences if you are in very different circles. Discord servers allow some level of protection against outsiders with ill intent.
Encouragement to be honest and unique:
To call what Discord allows "anonymity" is doing it a disservice. Humans are very keen on aesthetics and presentation; Discord allows custom names more aligned with spirituality, bios that can list your qualifications and what you do, and things being tracked back to your online persona allow the cultivation of a trustworthy semi-anonymous existence.
You're rewarded for saying what others want to hear (e.g. talking about Astral experiences, showing private rituals, etc.), and you're not punished through putting your legal or mundane name to it.
What makes a good group chat is at odds with what makes a good spiritual community:
So much of spiritual work nowadays is poor in quality and intent. From cultural appropriation, to misanthropy, to racism, to power abuse, these are all at odds with what makes non-toxic Discord communities, but are unfortunately what the beginnings of any science-art look like. Western magic is a mess, period; even communities that are self-taught Astral projectors who go directly to the spirit worlds to learn are full of spirit-focused speciesism - and human-focused speciesism, misanthropy in a different form. Spirit studies are akin to sociology, in that spirits are people and need to be understood and acknowledged as capable of all the evils humans are, and spiritual arts without spirits involved are done by equally imperfect and flawed people.
In order to move forward, we can't pretend we're further than we are as a collective, and in order to teach better practices we have to engage with the worse ones. In order to maintain a non-toxic Discord server, you need to keep out those who are bigoted, violent, generally aggressive, selfish, or whatever else that may cause them to create an awful group experience. This is much easier when the topics are things like non-spiritual racism which have centuries of studies and easily accessible information on them available, because "You should know better" is actually a viable reason to kick someone out. You cannot really be expected to know better on a topic when you exist in a society that doesn't know anything about it.
Most beginner and foundational spiritual texts in the West are problematic in some way. Many practices either are based in something problematic or have had problematic members and spokespeople. Again, enabling these flaws to inhabit a server is a good one-way ticket to toxicity, but navigating learning spiritual practices sees one go through dense minefields of the worst humanity has to offer, meaning it's next to impossible to cultivate a group of spiritual people who are "pure" enough to not spread harm in a server.
Learning is reduced to a strike system, rather than a lifelong endeavour:
Stemming from the above, taking on any subject like sociology, in this case spirit arts and studies, requires a lifetime of uncomfortable subjective learning about one's own biases. Listening to any group of people openly will open you to bigotry you can't imagine until it's later explained properly to you. These subjects see students constantly bouncing between extremes that, at the time they were inhabited, felt like comfortable middle grounds.
Servers suffer housing people who are extreme and have not realised they are extreme or, very likely, think their extremeness is a correct response to other extremes they believe are the current (unearned) norm. Servers shouldn't be expected to allow people in them to stay learning after many literal or metaphorical strikes for social faux-pas or outright hurting people. In the cases of archives and libraries, these people could slowly right themselves reading in the background, slowly figuring out the next position they need to fall into to become more learned, more in balance with the world, and more sociable and amicable, but a Discord server encourages one to speak their current positions on things and interact as they are.
As a side note, Discord encouraging people to be what they are instead of focusing on what they want to be is also the antithesis to communal growth, and ultimately destroys communities to create outcasts and toxic in-groups. Creating an archive of every bad or off-colour opinion one's said, treating the self like it's an immutable and constant thing, keeping lists of people who've done wrong in the past, inevitably leads bad people to come to two conclusions, first, that they can't change so why bother, and second, that they were unfairly made or born that way in a society that demands one is themselves, so clearly they should be bad.
Spirituality is both subjective and deeply personal:
Arguments are going to happen. In light of the point above on group chats being made by what hurts spiritual communities, how spiritual communities are full of misinformation and bigotry and so on, arguments arguably should happen and those with dangerous opinions should be around those with better ones. People should be challenged for being bigoted, and people calling others out to be performative should also be challenged. Communities need to hold each other accountable to grow, just as they need to hold each other together. Discord servers, however, shouldn't really freely allow arguing especially about personal and emotional topics. They also need to maintain some level of "Do not criticise people's beliefs"; the tried-and-true "no politics or religion" set of rules (e.g. "(...) at the dinner table". "(...) with people you just met") is not arbitrary or misinformed. These things are subjective, touchy, and bring out the best and worst in people through generally little fault of their own.
When I say "challenged", what I mean is I believe that there should be plenty of space for things that contradict personal opinions being available, even if they're dangerous, without conflict and confrontation, if we want to actually do something about bigotry and such rather than make ourselves look good. A good compromise between keeping a community happy and allowing those who are wrong to be called out is maintaining access to a wide variety of archived opinions, and arguably I posit this is how information is best used for learning. By housing a number of opinions, people can naturally form their own ideas on what works and what doesn't, and why; by allowing certain groups, rightfully or not, to be labelled outcasts and "evil" to some description, our objections and our ostracising only exacerbate the problem.
Discord servers would be worse off for allowing anyone with any beliefs in. In order to combat misinformation of all kinds and all severities, the misinformed should be both exposed to the more informed and given space to exist, to debate, to challenge, and to learn. Arguably, as in it's what I argue, this is best done internally and through reading other opinions. Picking up books that disagree with you, reading why others like things you dislike, hearing the "other side", as well as actually listening to your own side and breaking down its arguments to see what you do agree with, all do much better jobs at guiding someone away from ignorance than social ostracisation does. If a community ousts one for what they, at the time, believe is them seeing a truth the community doesn't or some inherent unchangeable part of them unfairly hated, they will not listen at best, and at worst be proven right - at least in their heads. And yet... enabling the ignorant to engage in Discord servers where they'll understandably annoy, antagonise, and so on the parts of the server trying to peacefully exist...
The subjective and personal is what causes the worst arguments, I believe, and the spiritual is currently deeply subjective and personal.
When a spiritual Discord is about learning, it's at odds with itself:
Beginner level lessons in history will teach you about primary and secondary sources; beginner level in most subjects sees the student learn that biases, bigotry, and other 'flaws' and issues exist in anything written by anyone describing anything. It's one of the first things you need to learn when approaching spiritual: Some writers are horrible people and say horrible things, and just because something is horrible morally that doesn't mean it has any less use. The world of research and sources is complicated, and will never conform to enforced binaries of good and pure, bad and impure. The impure can be good, the pure can be bad, you should not equate the two, this is spiritual studies 101.
It's important to read, listen to, study, etc., a wide range of beliefs, practices, and so on in order to actually grasp spiritual arts. If the worst person you know was the first person to verifiably get abducted by aliens, you'd have to listen to them on it, and saying it's untrue just because their general opinions are rancid is only hindering your development. It's one of the earliest skills you need to develop, learning how to spot and separate bias from the useful information, and it's important both because information is scarce and can't be thrown away when the metaphorical mould is only on the surface, and because people with bad opinions on one thing can be exactly right on others.
Discord servers... are at odds with allowing anything in any way morally or ethically dubious, let alone outright malicious. That's understandable for group chats, and largely anonymous servers. It is in many cases necessary. It is absolutely, entirely at odds with spiritual learning though, where the student, if they're at the stage where they're listening to anyone talk about anything, should understand already the subjective nature of every account they'll ever come across. It's also dangerous to instill the idea in beginners, which all are if they don't understand the basic idea of sources being subjective and possibly dangerous and how to navigate that, that they will be told when something is dangerous or that they can get good information from good people, and bad people are dangerous to learn from. Who is telling them that? Why? Do you really trust Discord user #73957459 that their recommendations are morally and ethically pure, especially when there's social punishment if they don't at least pretend to be pure when they aren't? Even if the beginner is taught this by well-meaning people... It's an utter failure of a teaching right from the get-go for a "learning" space.
This isn't just about books and published works, either. The person who goes around the Astral treating it like a video game massacring innocent spirits is inarguably a disgusting person, at least until they go through the personal Desert and learn fully, totally, the weight of what they've been doing, but their processes of wards against the avenging spirits' families, their ways of getting to and from the Astral, their recountings they indirectly give of routes through the Otherworlds, are all nutritious tidbits of information in a world starved of it when it comes to the spiritual arts. They shouldn't be allowed in a Discord server with access to other practitioners and their spirits. They absolutely are worth studying.
Discord is the opposite of an archive:
Hard to search, impermanent, and usually organised into chats rather than properly searchable digital shelves. In terms of being the opposite of an archive, first of all: Whatever conversations and progress are made in the chat are gated behind not a paywall but an effort-wall of signing up, signing in, joining, reading rules, applying, etc., and God-help-you if you want to link something in it to a research partner or bookmark a topic for later. Second, it's as quickly gone as it arrives; people don't know what topics they've missed unless they go back through chatter that generally has 0 to do with them. Third, it's up to the moderators to keep the information accessible, both in terms of keeping people on topic or deleting off topic messages, and keeping channels available.
Fourth, what information is acceptable to archive is rigorously run through the rules which naturally filter out things from biased sources to unsourced "UPG" in general. Even when not run through rules, social etiquette that will be different in each server will prevent things being said and archived with threat of ostracising, mockery, or even just being ignored. Fifth, information has a set length whose numbers of letters are enforced by Discord, and whose amount of paragraphs are enforced by social etiquette, meaning information should be as quick and easy to parse as possible and skewed towards conversation rather than informing, the latter being socially rude. Sixth, the tone of a Discord chat is inevitably chatting, leaving many things said casually, many sources left out, or the opposite, many things said that are taken very seriously, and many sources declined and warned about given the aforementioned issue with the biases and bigotry of the people writing them.
Discarding sources and traditions due to moral issues is inherent to Discord's format. Communities need to be monitored and moderated, and instead of it being a free archive where you can read whatever you want and you're trusted to be "normal about it" as they say, what comes and goes heavily influences the behaviour people think they can exhibit in the server. Introducing racist works to a Discord has a much different effect to archiving it on the Internet Archive, and no amount of reminding people they need critical thinking skills will stop a server from turning toxic in response to what is perceived as overhearing people talk about racist beliefs, rather than stumbling on a biased book in a library.
Discord is an informational graveyard:
Archives value the information within themselves to try and prolong its longevity. To do that, they need to value the information over everything else, including reactions to it, possible moral issues with it, its uses and helpfulness, etc. Discord servers are first and foremost chatrooms meant to be used by gamers who certainly don't want everything they say and do archived and available.
Archives, regardless of how well they kept, all turn to dust someday, but servers die every day, and even those left for archival purposes aren't actually archived, because people have long since forgotten the many conversations they'd thought were useful because of how many topics since then the server has seen. Eventually, when Discord goes down, an entire era of work will be lost, either through deletion of servers or through the mere fact that scanning thousands of pages of "Heyyyy everyone" "Heyy" "How are you" etc. is just not feasible to find what might be worth keeping.