We Are All Spiritual Orphans
- I loved this festival when they first started a few years back - said my friend when I told her I plan to go there for the first time - But since the pandemic it’s been full of celebrities who are like, I’ve just awakened to the true nature of reality and now I’m gonna teach you all about it.
- Isn’t this everyone at a certain stage in life? - I asked - I know I’ve been there myself, and I can’t blame them for wanting to share their discoveries with the world.
- Yeah possibly, but why would the organizers choose such people to teach official workshops? They probably enjoy the publicity that the big names attract… but the quality of workshops and lectures has gone down dramatically.
Well, I can totally imagine how this could have happened.
I guess I’m lucky I was never a celebrity
For if I were one, I’d definitely use my platform to teach workshops after my first spiritual experiences. How could I not? The visions were absolutely clear that I've been given a sneak peek into The Most Important And Profound Cosmic Mystery, and that my job now is to share what I’ve learned with as many people as possible. It sounds funny when written down like this, but at that time it felt more intense and real than anything I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t something I could simply ignore or frame as a curious but meaningless dream.
How do you make sense of an experience that your culture has no language to describe? Things like this simply never happened in the world I grew up in. I didn’t know a single person who had any idea what I was talking about, or had ever seen or heard similar things. I knew a handful of my friends had experience with psychedelics, but none of them said it had the faintest religious flavor. If even they thought I was going crazy, what chances did I have for anyone to understand me, let alone help me sort it out?
The church I grew up in was always suspicious of anyone claiming they had personal experiences of the Divine. Every now and then they’ll reluctantly confirm someone’s visions of Jesus or Mary as having substance and merit, but usually only after that person is dead and officially considered a saint. It is such a rare event that the place of such revelations often becomes a major pilgrimage site with millions of people visiting every year. Knowing God personally is only for the few chosen ones, the rest of us mere mortals can at most pray for their intercession.
I never thought things like this can happen to real people
Even after leaving the church, my model of reality didn’t have room for “deeply meaningful and personal experiences of the Divine”. I knew some Buddhists supposedly reached such extraordinary states, but I thought that like in the case of saints, only a handful of perfect Buddhas were capable of getting there. Definitely not someone like me. So when I eventually found myself in this impossible scenario, the only explanations I could come up with were that I was either going batshit insane, or that some kind of God is real indeed, and They’ve personally chosen me to be Their messenger to the rest of the world that will never get to experience these mysterious and profound divine realities. If this was a relatively common thing, I’d surely have met at least one person who had experienced that too, wouldn’t I?
Looking back, I’m incredibly lucky I hadn’t met anyone like this at that time. I’d be too eager to swallow anything they said without questioning. I was so desperate for acknowledgement that I wasn’t going insane or making it all up that if someone came to me and said “I know exactly what you’re going through, let me explain it all to you and be your guide”, I would totally believe in every single word they said. This is probably how smart people end up in weird or abusive cults.
Or if I had already read and written enough on spiritual topics, this experience might have push me to become a teacher or guru myself. That’s what I was literally asked to do, wasn’t I? My friend Jordan wrote recently about how some profound and earth-shattering visions sent him preaching that we’re all Gods with infinite power to create reality. As I watched Jordan’s journey unfolding, I knew that I’d most likely go down the same road and enjoy every single minute of it if I had enough people looking up to me as some kind of spiritual authority. I wanted to believe I had the wisdom in me to skilfully navigate this tricky terrain, but I had none of the wisdom, just a lot of luck and an incredibly grounded husband who kept me from flying too far off into uncharted realms.
Another Twitter friend recently shared a fascinating story about how he unknowingly stepped into a guru kind of role in an intense and all-consuming relationship with a certain woman. The experience was too much for them to handle and left both of them deeply scarred and hurt. The conclusion he came to was, in his own words:
We’re all making it all up, because what else can we do?
Who could possibly tell us what this all meant and what were supposed to do with this? There weren’t any elders around that we could turn to for advice. The best advice I could get from the elders at home was to confess my sins and repent, as this must surely have been the Devil playing tricks on me. I could either try to figure it all out on my own, or look for some kind of spiritual authority who could explain it to me, but how would I know which one of the many self-proclaimed gurus was trustworthy? How would I tell a clueless but outspoken celebrity from the real deal?
Our culture has no tradition of relating to mystical or spiritual experiences. There are some other cultures where traditions like these are still alive, but are they at all relevant in the modern technological world? And how would I know if the essence of it didn’t get lost in translation when transmitted across both space and time? Is there any way to tell if Western teachers of Asian or Native American traditions stay in any way true to their lineage?
One would have thought the hippies must have sorted this out, but they were probably as clueless as we are, if not even more. These experiences and concepts were even more novel and unheard of during their times, making them travel through some truly uncharted realms. These days we can quickly look up pretty much any topic on the internet and compare our notes with other people on a similar journey. This might lead into some delusional echo chambers, but also to devoted seekers gently pointing out the loopholes in each other’s understanding. All the hippies could only rely were the people they’ve personally met, the books that physically fell into their hands, and their own personal experience. As far as I can tell, that’s not very much to map out all the things that can’t be easily described with words and logic.
Maybe we should just ignore all of this and move on?
If otherworldly experiences can either send us into delusional grandiosity or make us fall prey to all sorts of pseudo-gurus, why should we even engage in this kind of stuff? Maybe our ancestors knew what they were doing when they strongly discouraged dabbling in the mystical and occult, and warned that this might open gateways to demonic influence?
Funnily enough, what I’m doing with this newsletter is more or less what I’d envisioned myself doing back then. I am indeed sharing what I’ve learned with the world, although in a completely different way and with a completely different mindset than I first imagined. There was a grain of deep and profound truth in these visions that I wouldn’t be able to access otherwise, it was just wrapped around my childish notions about how the world works and my place in it.
Could I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and live happily anyway? At this point it’s hard for me to even imagine how my life would look like had I chosen to refuse the call. The cat is out of the bag, for better or worse, and instead of hiding in a corner and waiting for someone to save us, we’d better use whatever ways life offers us to grow up and become the elders we always wished we had. Yes, we’ll make a lot of dumb and occasionally serious mistakes, or get stuck on some weird and delusional concepts, but that’s still better than not trying at all. Our children, grandchildren, and all the kids that will come after them are counting on us.
“Chop wood, carry water.” is a very good thing to remember for me in relation to this.
And, even though I haven’t been raised Christian (although I did go to church a few times with a childhood friend, and my dad told me lots of stories from all kinds of cultures and religions, including Christendom), I also find there’s a lot of good lessons around spiritual experiences like this hidden between the lines in the Bible.
PS. I, too, am grateful for having a very grounded spouse. 😆
Great piece. Hey there are people like layman pascal, Bruce alderman, and John vervaeke talking about building the structures needed to hold people through such experiences in a new type of religionless religion. They have an ongoing discussion about it on the integral stage podcast. They are thinking through all these aspects that can make a new type of religion. Also Brendan graham dempsey is writing about this stuff in his building a cathedral book and in emergentism. There are people out here working on this. You’re not alone.