In Search of the World We Cannot See

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When I first arrived headfirst and screaming in this ash-covered wasteland you call the modern world, I knew not the language, the customs, or the ruling superstitions. But I have now spent some years tucked away in the spare room of this failing TV repair shop in the South Bronx, observing the ways and means of the people of this era. I dare to hope I have derived a few cogent observations from this time of sacred isolation. 

Among the educated, upper middle class of the persons of this land, it has become deeply unfashionable to say “I am not an atheist.” As if one can define himself in opposition to what he is not. A better rewording may be “I believe in more than the material world,” or “I am a spiritualist.” Although most won’t admit it, I can’t help but feel that the underlying source of this hostility is often rooted in a kind of contempt for the ignorant and poor. Religion is for trailer park trash in Arkansas or ignorant Russian peasants in the icefields of Siberia. But I am a well-educated modern man or woman. All that can be understood is understood and I have a college degree to prove I know it all. But this sentiment is absurd on its face. How many people living today can understand and explain the workings of a computer, an airplane, or a nuclear submarine? Never mind the more ethereal, more human things, like love, evil, wonder, or friendship. 

A strictly scientific or materialist worldview leaves little room for these more mushy human experiences. In this age, love has become the rubbing together of two strangers’ genitalia, and friendship the evolutionary vestige of a time when our ancestors needed nonkin to help fight lions or other roving packs of apes. These frameworks are not wrong, per se. But do they not leave something lacking? Do they really describe truth in its absolute totality? When I peer into the eyes of a woman I love, and feel time standing still, is that really only because she has certain genetic markers that my DNA finds advantageous for potential future offspring? How can an inanimate molecular structure want for anything? Am I merely psychotic? I’ll leave those questions to be answered by someone far more qualified than myself. 

But it was with these and other related questions in mind that I began to explore the world that our senses cannot see or hear or taste or touch or smell. A world that can only be explored by the heart and by emotional intuition. It has been a deeply rewarding experience. I have not resurrected God from the dead and I have no new access to any undiscovered truths. I can only relate to you the path that I have followed and the signposts that have guided me along the way. And because of this journey, where once I saw a humankind sleepwalking to its own mass suicide, I now find hope. I find meaning. And I pray – whatever that might mean to you – that others too will come to see what I have seen. 

Like many of this time and age, I grew up with a vaguely atheistic sense of religion. I practiced the holidays, and I attended the sacrifices, but it was only ever a surface-level form of spirituality. The traditions were practiced because they were tradition, not because they embodied some grand metaphysical truth. The gods were just as real to me as the monsters and the heroes out of tales for children. Comforting, yes; instructive, sure; but ultimately nothing more than myths of old. Something one abandons as he matures, like a favorite blanket or sleeping with a light on. 

And for a time I derived a kind of smug intellectual superiority for my ability to cast off myths that other more simple minds clung to with such desperation. “It’s just superstition,” I would sneer. “The ramblings of ancient savages.” The annihilation of the myths of old would be the last great liberation of Mankind. The gods of the past were the last real barrier to an earthly paradise, and once they were toppled all the people of the world would live in perfect cooperative bliss. Forever. Somehow. 

But as time wore on, and I spent more time in the world, the more a creeping shadow came to overtake my heart. A brutal nihilism poisoned my mind. What was the point of anything, if all things were destined to crumble into dust? Why be kind? Why try to love? Why protect human life? Why protect the natural world? All would be destroyed in the end. And the evolutionary explanations offered little comfort. Of course people choose their mates because of random genetic traits that provide an evolutionary advantage to their offspring. But does that explain what love is? That thing countless men and women all across the globe, and all across time, have praised and bemoaned in art and literature with such yearning and such hurt? Taken separately, how does the slow grinding of genetic material over millions of years explain what I am experiencing right now? And for that matter, what is “I”? How could a random assemblage of physical matter even begin to develop a sense of itself as a thing removed from the rest of physical reality? These questions are likely sophomoric to an undergraduate philosophy student, but they ate me up nonetheless. And I am not an undergraduate philosophy student. I am a man who has fallen out of time and found a place to live in a failing TV repair shop. I had no choice but to confront these questions. 

Like the youth of another generation, the door to the spiritual realm was first opened to me with a small white tab of paper. Odorless and tasteless was the chemical splashed thereon, but profound and mind-altering were its effects. I watched walls dance and leaves paint the sky and I heard rush-hour Manhattan silent as a church on a Tuesday afternoon. I felt my body dissolve as the thing I was became a crowd of different people passing by. But most profound of all was the striking sense that something was very wrong with the world I knew. Why were we building walls and identities to separate ourselves from ourself? Were we not all one? Did we not share a common soul? Did we not exist for the common advancement of all? I did not know. But I felt there was a deep intuitive truth to these thoughts. And the flippant explanation that it was a molecule interacting with my brain was entirely unsatisfactory. Molecule? Brain? Are these not human concepts? Are they not the very things the white paper tab had worked so hard to show me were illusions? 

I turned then with an open mind to some of the ideas I had so hurriedly cast off in the pride of my youth. A great deal of intellectual haughtiness remained in my path, so instead of following the great mass of spiritualists I sought out something more niche, and found my first great comfort in the writings of the Stoics. 

In this era, Stoicism has become little more than another self-help brand to market and sell, and its loudest advancers often entirely fail to interact with the school’s spiritual teachings, preferring instead to use it as a guidebook for how to feel less and work harder in an overstimulating world. But this does the Stoics a grand disservice. While they were indeed proponents of mastering the passions and denying the more animalistic and impulsive parts of the self, the Stoics believed in doing so not for selfish gain, but because it was the right thing to do. Because the universe had been ordered in such a way for all living things to lean on one another in mutual harmony, and to work together toward a common ultimate good. Take, for instance, a few of the following quotes:

“Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet, or eyelids, or like the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction?” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

“Once reduced to ashes, we are all the same size. Born unequal, we die equal.” (Seneca, Epistles)

“As a part, you inhere in the Whole. You will vanish into that which gave you birth; or rather, you will be transmitted once more into the creative Reason of the universe.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

“One whose mind is on receiving forgets what he has already received.” (Seneca, Epistles)

“Nature’s highest happiness lies in changing the things that are, and forming new things after their kind.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

“Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptivity of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse, and all play their parts in the causation of every event that happens.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

“Only let us return to the law of nature, and riches are ready and waiting.” (Seneca, Epistles)

“Time is a river, the resistless flow of all created things. One thing no sooner comes in sight than it is hurried past and another is borne along, only to be swept away in its turn.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

“If you happen to be in a wood dense with ancient trees of unusual height, where interlocking branches exclude the light of day, the loftiness and seclusion of that forest spot, the wonder of finding above ground such a deep, unbroken shade, will convince you that divinity is there.” (Seneca, Epistles)

Is not natural beauty one way by which the divine communicates with us?

“Every part of me will one day be refashioned, by a process of transition, into some other portion of the universe; which in its turn will again be changed into yet another part, and so onward to infinity.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

“Weak and fluid ourselves, we stand in the midst of illusions. So let us direct our minds toward things that are eternal.” (Seneca, Epistles)

“Think of the totality of all Being, and what a mite of it is yours; think of all Time, and the brief fleeting instant of it that is allotted to yourself; think of Destiny, and how puny a part of it you are.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

Once I had completed my survey of the Stoics, I could no longer in good conscience call myself an atheist. I began to talk of the universe as a mind, with its own thoughts and goals, and I came to think that we were all minor agents in this greater overarching plan. In other words, we were to the One as individual cells are to a human body. Individuals in a sense, but beholden to higher imperatives that we could not fully understand. The most accurate term I could find to describe myself was that of a deist. I believed in a kind of god, but I also believed its ultimate nature was unknowable and that it was not a personal figure that yearned to commune with its creation, as is typically advanced by the Christians. If it did commune with us, it did so only as a form of communion with itself; just as the nervous system commands blood cells to clot near an open wound.

But if the universe was a mind, and its actions served a purpose, how is one to understand its desires? Could those desires be understood? Do we do so subconsciously? Or do we possess our own inborn agency? Could a white blood cell refuse to hunt and kill an invading bacterial infection if it chose to do so?

I soon received something of an answer. Sometimes it isn’t chemicals or books that reveal deep truths, but people. The chance meeting of two minds can feel heaven-sent. As if this person you have never met was designed specifically for you, came with answers to your questions, and came right at the time you were asking those questions. Many call this feeling serendipity. Others might call it the will of God or the mysterious workings of the Dao. Whatever you call this experience, it can radically change a person’s life forever. I had such an experience through a chance meeting with someone who is now a dear and cherished friend of mine. From our very first meeting, her mouth seemed to pour forth endless truths that I had long been seeking, like the workings of a holy oracle. Her very being seemed to radiate truth. And in that glorious summer of serendipities she recommended a short book that put to words everything she embodied. It seemed to have descended like a holy text handed down from on high. That book is a work known to countless people all around the world: The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho. 

The Alchemist taught me to embrace emotional intuition as a kind of guide through the parts of life that evade logical analysis. That such feelings were not the fickle workings of a dishonest heart but a kind of window into the mind of the One itself. A simple story on its face, The Alchemist follows a young shepherd boy named Santiago on his quest to see the pyramids, convinced by a vision that a great destiny awaited him there. But the best truths are often contained in seemingly simple things, like the flash of an eye or the turning of a smile. Indeed, as Jack Kerouac once said, “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” And Coelho left me with many truths that I revisit to this day:

“‘[...] whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.’”

“[...] there was a language in the world that everyone understood [...]. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.”

“The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.”

“At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into [the girl’s] dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between laughter and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke [...]. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than anything in the world.”

This passage remains a personal favorite of mine. I have yet to find a better description anywhere else in literature of the feeling one gets when peering into the eyes of a person he or she truly loves. Is there not a truth in it?

Where then was I now? I was perhaps more than a deist. Perhaps the One was not an uncaring intelligence but a force that worked for the betterment of each individual. Perhaps through the betterment of each individual person the One in turn bettered itself. Perhaps we were more than cells agonizing toward a purpose we would never understand. Perhaps each individual journey is sacred for its own sake, and that the workings of each mind and heart are inherently holy. 

It was at this time that I stumbled into the texts of the Christian tradition. Another serendipity. Another instance of intuition guiding me by the hand. Among the fashionable and educated persons of this age, Christianity is seen as one of the most wretched and regressive schools of spirituality. Manifestation and crystal magic often hold more credence with educated moderns than Christianity does, which has come to represent a wellspring of hatred and oppression. It has been so thoroughly vanquished by the modern mind that many don’t even bother reading its texts, thinking they must only contain prohibitions on sex and commands to despise homosexuals. 

Such was my position. But at the time I was writing my first long work of fiction, a novella called Behold a White Horse, which you can read for free here on this Substack. Since the story was set in a highly Christian ancient society, I wanted to make sure the characters spoke and acted in a way that felt authentic. So I dove into the books of the Christian canon and the theological writings of the Eastern Orthodox Church, hoping to take away some surface-level sayings to give my story more color. Instead I found a world of deep spiritual insights and an infinite, ever-expanding richness of meaning. Like other living religions, Christianity is a fractal: the more you look, the more you will find. Indeed, as Jesus himself is reported to have said, “Seek, and you will find.” (Gospel of Matthew, NKJV, 7:7)

A full recounting of every great Christian mantra would take far too much time, so I will limit myself instead to a few personal favorites. While these writings might have once bounced off my materialist mind for their banality and commonality, my new spiritual framework allowed me to read a richness into them I might not otherwise have seen. A few examples:

“‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” (Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, NRSV, 18:3)

Imagine a world of such radical innocence.

“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’” (Gospel of Matthew, NRSV, 19:23-24)

“‘[...] Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.’” (Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, NRSV, 6:27-31)

Imagine a world in which all people were this willing to forgive one another.

“[...] suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us [...].” (St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans, NRSV, 5:3-5)

“[...] those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” (St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans, NRSV, 8:5)

“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (St. Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians, NRSV, 1:20)

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” (St. Paul in the Letter to the Philippians, NRSV, 2:3-4)

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (St. John in the First Letter of John, NRSV, 4:16)

“The great cannot exist without the small, nor the small without the great. There is a certain blending in everything, and therein lies the advantage. Let us take our body as an example. The head without the feet is nothing. Even the smallest parts of our body are necessary and useful to the whole body, yet all the members coalesce harmoniously and unite in mutual subjection, so that the whole body may be saved.” (Pope Clement I, First Letter of Clement, 37:4–5)

“[...] the greater one seems to be, the more one ought to be humble, and the more one ought to seek the common advantage of all, and not of oneself.” (Pope Clement I, First Letter of Clement, 48:6)

“‘[...] wisdom is vindicated by all her children.’” (Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, NRSV, 7:35)

Where then am I left? Am I a Christian? No. Am I a Stoic? No. A New-Age spiritualist? In some senses yes, in other senses no. But I’m not sure it matters. Like life, perhaps one’s spiritual growth is best understood as a journey. You cannot understand one moment of that journey in isolation from all the other moments that make it a path through time. And besides, I’m not sure labels serve any purpose but to shut one off from other potential sources of understanding. For as it says in the Wisdom of Solomon, “Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.” (Wisdom of Solomon, NRSV, 6:12). 

So what am I? A man and a student. Beyond that I cannot say anything with any certainty. Some readers might ask, “Where are the teachings from Judaism? From Islam? From Buddhism? From Hinduism? From Daoism?” And to that I would say that these have not been mentioned precisely because I am such a novice. I have simply yet to explore those traditions with the same depth I have afforded Christianity or Stoicism. But as I progress, and as I uncover each new stone on this path taking me God-Knows-Where, I hope to explore them each in turn and use the learnings I derive to further inform my sense of the world we cannot see. Perhaps this is a foolhardy exercise. But my intuition tells me it is good, and for that reason I will continue to pursue it. 

For now I must leave things there. Stavros gets annoyed when I spend too much time on my ass and too little time fixing the TVs. Until next time then, I wish you a good journey. 

– Aesop