Factors and Roots of Tendency for New Spirituality among Tehran's Citizens

This article seeks to identify the factors, fields and indicators for tendency to "new spirituality" among the citizens of Tehran to understand its nature and the reasons for its occurrence. The method used in this article is a qualitative one and its methodology is thematic analysis. Also, semi-structured interviews and theoretical sampling has been used for data collection. The eight themes which were identified from 23 interviews as factors are: moral tension, experience of suffering, deprivation, access and effective communication with new spiritualists/ spirituality, the crisis of meaning, metaphysical experience and marginal experience. Four themes have been identified as fields: modernization, cultural dissatisfaction, the experience of other universes and emotional orientations. Also, indicators were divided into three dimensions: cognitive, psychological, and practical. The cognitive orientation was identified with new metaphysical beliefs, changes in the meaning system; attempt to approximate the current and past meaning system, and changes in the goals of life. The psychological tendencies included: the attraction of good psychological effects, metaphysical experience; and practical orientation was introduced by attracting to methods of facilitating the social and economic development and attracting to functions.