A well written look at a very important subject. I am going through a similar, though not identical journey. It seems like a lot of people are. There's a definite change of climate in the "noosphere".
I had the advantage of roaming freely in my youth, spiritually and psychically. I attended a conference at a UFO ranch years before I attended Mass or made my First Holy Communion. I was a “seeker,” and “spiritual but not religious” for about two decades of my early life, and I was able to consider many ideas with an open mind.
The only thing that seemed to enchain me was the debt I owed to the Zeitgeist. I struggled to shake the specter of materialism and fully believe in invisible spiritual realities, and at the same time everything human seemed inexplicably sad and shabby, so that I could find little comfort in mundane life either. I was early introduced to notions of puppet masters and the manipulation of perception, so that a concept of humanity’s being under the thumb of malign forces haunted me, and nothing could be received without suspicion.
When I did come to Christianity, it was with the sense that here at last was something wholesome, and a truth at once coterminous with reality itself and present in the most piercingly clear and immediate way to my poor human heart. I received this one day while sitting in the park, in what felt like a mild theophany.
No doubts now could seep up from below to undermine the truth I would cleave to (because truth itself reached below the waters of doubt, which were mere creatures), nor could anything interpose itself between my mercurial soul and the truth that reached out to me, because this truth was a Person and was faithful beyond all else to the ones He deigned to address as “thou.”
I had been reading Tom Cheetham’s books on the work of Henry Corbin, such as “Green Man, Earth Angel” and “All the World an Icon.” In one of these, he quotes Angelus Silesius’ “Cherubinic Wanderer.” This aphorism has stuck with me ever since:
‘Naught is but I and thou.
Were there nor thou nor I,
then God is no more God
and heaven falls from the sky.’
This sprawling heap of jewels and shit, this terrestrial confusion, which seemed impossible to get past as my eyes strained into the far distance for some glimpse of God or true happiness, was in fact no barrier at all to a direct touch of God in the soul, from this God who descended from above to restore azure heaven to what had become a blear (chemtrail-streaked) sky.
It has done me good to be a Christian. I am less confused and sad than I was, and even mundane life seems less hollow to me now. It all counts, and God embraces it, holds it together, lends it meaning.
Nonetheless, I have rehearsed all of that only to get to a point where I can explain to you that I too feel again a need to wander and to seek. Something is missing.
I _cannot stand_ the Christian obsession with sin: bloody everything returns to how we and our friends are doing it wrong, and are in real and present danger of eternal torment. As though the Lamb shed His Blood for the life of the world, but for many of us chuckleheads it was water off a duck’s back.
I have no problem acknowledging I am imperfect, and more than once I have hurt people, or not done as I should. Sin and imperfection are self-evidently facts of our experience here, and I wish to grow and become better.
But rather than rejoice, dilate our hearts, hope in the One with power to save, and start riding that positive path upwards, riding on the coattails that still stream out behind the One Who rose on Easter morning, the One Who makes the wine to flow again, we are urged to cower and quiver and beat ourselves silly with fear.
That’s not the whole story, but I can’t get past the fact that it is part of the story. I can feel that our salvation is not won cheaply, neither on the Cross nor in the day-to-day of our lives. I don’t know how salvation in the end shall be applied to each and all, for surely it comes up from within and remakes us (sanctification, theosis), at once respecting our particular haecceity and perfecting us. This doesn’t come easy, and I don’t take it for granted. But it’s dumb as fuck to think that the process just bloody fails in some cases and all that’s left over is never-ending burnination. It’s embarrassing that that’s part of Christianity.
Also, I see a sense of reverence and love for ritual in some of my neopagan-adjacent friends, a kind of rich and varied sacramental imagination. It sometimes makes me want to be a good witch instead of trying to be a good Catholic.
So far I have stayed though, because prudence indeed would dictate that all the experiences that led me to Christ’s Church must not be cast aside too readily, and because I still very often feel subtly uplifted and strengthened by participation at Mass. I would like to be a Christian. I just feel that I need to set out seeking again for a deeper, juicier, more whole and rooted basis for my faith.
People are talking about the re-enchantment of the cosmos. We need this! Christianity trying to be an oasis in a wasteland of materialism and literal, one-track thinking becomes parched and stupid itself. My faith became too narrow while I was busy trying to color within the lines. I want to go out seeking again!
I hope God is infinitely more merciful than what has been conveyed by the vast majority of Christians down the centuries. I don't have the heart to tell people they deserve to suffer eternal torment because they failed to believe in unverifiable claims, or that they would not accept some presuppositions. That just can't be the case, and you're right, it's the most frightening and embarrassing part of the faith.
Plato was the first major Ancient Greek thinker to influence me, and he continues to have preeminence in my thinking over Aristotle. However, the Cave made most sense to me in light (pun) of the Forms. That relationship is what I see in most reading I do. The prisoner is only part of the meaning. Combined with the fullness of Plato’s Forms, the allegory leads to a more optimistic and universally applicable understanding, in my view. I really enjoyed your unique perspective. I would encourage bookmarking the prisoner dilemma and contemplating Plato’s Forms with it to see if that helps in getting to your answer. I love starting where you did with Plato.
I can definitely see the parallels between the allegory of the cave, and Christianity, more specifically, the Catholic Church. I have finally escaped the cave, and what’s really scary is that it’s really hard to tell most of the “prisoners“ that I know that I have escaped for fear of the metaphorical “violence,” I might be subject to.
I thought it was particularly interesting when you said “ But it’s so critical to get your mind right and know what you believe, instead of always being in the position of trying to force yourself to find ways to accept things they tell you you have to believe.”
I know when, raising my children, there were many circumstances where my intuition and my lived experience were telling me to guide them in a direction that was not in keeping with the puppets on the wall… but the prisoners around me somehow kept me forcing myself to advise/guide/indoctrinate my children that the puppets were real. Now that I have escaped the cave (the Catholic Church), and my children are now adults, we have had some of the most gratifying and authentic conversations about the realities of life outside the cave. I am a better mom and we are a stronger family because of it. I can’t now “unsee” that it really all was just shadows.
Funny enough, it was one of my daughters who first pointed out to me the parallels between the allegory of the cave, and our prior faith. I am grateful for her, and I am grateful that I happened upon your writings many months ago. You always make me contemplate things in fresh ways, and I love that! So thank you, Steve.
A good read, though my first encounter with the Cave Allegory was during my atheist years, with its significance striking me more after my journey in the opposite direction, going from the 2D-esque world of materialism toward a broader reality that encompassed the spiritual—both the World of Facts and the World of Values unfolding, making my prior experience feel narrow.
Were I still in the old camp, I don’t know that I would care whether puppet masters were manipulating myself or others, as I’d likely reason that both the puppets and the masters share the same inconsequential fate.
Note: Updated the quotes from Weinstein and added timestamped video links, for those interested in chasing those particular rabbit holes.
A well written look at a very important subject. I am going through a similar, though not identical journey. It seems like a lot of people are. There's a definite change of climate in the "noosphere".
I had the advantage of roaming freely in my youth, spiritually and psychically. I attended a conference at a UFO ranch years before I attended Mass or made my First Holy Communion. I was a “seeker,” and “spiritual but not religious” for about two decades of my early life, and I was able to consider many ideas with an open mind.
The only thing that seemed to enchain me was the debt I owed to the Zeitgeist. I struggled to shake the specter of materialism and fully believe in invisible spiritual realities, and at the same time everything human seemed inexplicably sad and shabby, so that I could find little comfort in mundane life either. I was early introduced to notions of puppet masters and the manipulation of perception, so that a concept of humanity’s being under the thumb of malign forces haunted me, and nothing could be received without suspicion.
When I did come to Christianity, it was with the sense that here at last was something wholesome, and a truth at once coterminous with reality itself and present in the most piercingly clear and immediate way to my poor human heart. I received this one day while sitting in the park, in what felt like a mild theophany.
No doubts now could seep up from below to undermine the truth I would cleave to (because truth itself reached below the waters of doubt, which were mere creatures), nor could anything interpose itself between my mercurial soul and the truth that reached out to me, because this truth was a Person and was faithful beyond all else to the ones He deigned to address as “thou.”
I had been reading Tom Cheetham’s books on the work of Henry Corbin, such as “Green Man, Earth Angel” and “All the World an Icon.” In one of these, he quotes Angelus Silesius’ “Cherubinic Wanderer.” This aphorism has stuck with me ever since:
‘Naught is but I and thou.
Were there nor thou nor I,
then God is no more God
and heaven falls from the sky.’
This sprawling heap of jewels and shit, this terrestrial confusion, which seemed impossible to get past as my eyes strained into the far distance for some glimpse of God or true happiness, was in fact no barrier at all to a direct touch of God in the soul, from this God who descended from above to restore azure heaven to what had become a blear (chemtrail-streaked) sky.
It has done me good to be a Christian. I am less confused and sad than I was, and even mundane life seems less hollow to me now. It all counts, and God embraces it, holds it together, lends it meaning.
Nonetheless, I have rehearsed all of that only to get to a point where I can explain to you that I too feel again a need to wander and to seek. Something is missing.
I _cannot stand_ the Christian obsession with sin: bloody everything returns to how we and our friends are doing it wrong, and are in real and present danger of eternal torment. As though the Lamb shed His Blood for the life of the world, but for many of us chuckleheads it was water off a duck’s back.
I have no problem acknowledging I am imperfect, and more than once I have hurt people, or not done as I should. Sin and imperfection are self-evidently facts of our experience here, and I wish to grow and become better.
But rather than rejoice, dilate our hearts, hope in the One with power to save, and start riding that positive path upwards, riding on the coattails that still stream out behind the One Who rose on Easter morning, the One Who makes the wine to flow again, we are urged to cower and quiver and beat ourselves silly with fear.
That’s not the whole story, but I can’t get past the fact that it is part of the story. I can feel that our salvation is not won cheaply, neither on the Cross nor in the day-to-day of our lives. I don’t know how salvation in the end shall be applied to each and all, for surely it comes up from within and remakes us (sanctification, theosis), at once respecting our particular haecceity and perfecting us. This doesn’t come easy, and I don’t take it for granted. But it’s dumb as fuck to think that the process just bloody fails in some cases and all that’s left over is never-ending burnination. It’s embarrassing that that’s part of Christianity.
Also, I see a sense of reverence and love for ritual in some of my neopagan-adjacent friends, a kind of rich and varied sacramental imagination. It sometimes makes me want to be a good witch instead of trying to be a good Catholic.
So far I have stayed though, because prudence indeed would dictate that all the experiences that led me to Christ’s Church must not be cast aside too readily, and because I still very often feel subtly uplifted and strengthened by participation at Mass. I would like to be a Christian. I just feel that I need to set out seeking again for a deeper, juicier, more whole and rooted basis for my faith.
People are talking about the re-enchantment of the cosmos. We need this! Christianity trying to be an oasis in a wasteland of materialism and literal, one-track thinking becomes parched and stupid itself. My faith became too narrow while I was busy trying to color within the lines. I want to go out seeking again!
I hope God is infinitely more merciful than what has been conveyed by the vast majority of Christians down the centuries. I don't have the heart to tell people they deserve to suffer eternal torment because they failed to believe in unverifiable claims, or that they would not accept some presuppositions. That just can't be the case, and you're right, it's the most frightening and embarrassing part of the faith.
Your comments are always fascinating, and should probably be a Substack in themselves!
As always, well done, my brother.
Plato was the first major Ancient Greek thinker to influence me, and he continues to have preeminence in my thinking over Aristotle. However, the Cave made most sense to me in light (pun) of the Forms. That relationship is what I see in most reading I do. The prisoner is only part of the meaning. Combined with the fullness of Plato’s Forms, the allegory leads to a more optimistic and universally applicable understanding, in my view. I really enjoyed your unique perspective. I would encourage bookmarking the prisoner dilemma and contemplating Plato’s Forms with it to see if that helps in getting to your answer. I love starting where you did with Plato.
I can definitely see the parallels between the allegory of the cave, and Christianity, more specifically, the Catholic Church. I have finally escaped the cave, and what’s really scary is that it’s really hard to tell most of the “prisoners“ that I know that I have escaped for fear of the metaphorical “violence,” I might be subject to.
I thought it was particularly interesting when you said “ But it’s so critical to get your mind right and know what you believe, instead of always being in the position of trying to force yourself to find ways to accept things they tell you you have to believe.”
I know when, raising my children, there were many circumstances where my intuition and my lived experience were telling me to guide them in a direction that was not in keeping with the puppets on the wall… but the prisoners around me somehow kept me forcing myself to advise/guide/indoctrinate my children that the puppets were real. Now that I have escaped the cave (the Catholic Church), and my children are now adults, we have had some of the most gratifying and authentic conversations about the realities of life outside the cave. I am a better mom and we are a stronger family because of it. I can’t now “unsee” that it really all was just shadows.
Funny enough, it was one of my daughters who first pointed out to me the parallels between the allegory of the cave, and our prior faith. I am grateful for her, and I am grateful that I happened upon your writings many months ago. You always make me contemplate things in fresh ways, and I love that! So thank you, Steve.
A good read, though my first encounter with the Cave Allegory was during my atheist years, with its significance striking me more after my journey in the opposite direction, going from the 2D-esque world of materialism toward a broader reality that encompassed the spiritual—both the World of Facts and the World of Values unfolding, making my prior experience feel narrow.
Were I still in the old camp, I don’t know that I would care whether puppet masters were manipulating myself or others, as I’d likely reason that both the puppets and the masters share the same inconsequential fate.