The Threshold of the Spiritual Age
Meditations | 003
I searched for all my life It stayed just out of sight With nothing left to try I stared straight at the light It burned out both my eyes I was caught between two nights Death and waiting blind But I finally saw in ultraviolet ~ My Epic, “Ultraviolet”
All of humanity in our age floats in a psychic coracle, bobbing gently above the fathomless deeps of uncharted reality. We have convinced ourselves that the only existence is what we can plumb with our hands, the top twenty-four inches of the metaphysical ocean. Across a comparative breath of human history, several centuries, we have suddenly transformed human beings into creatures of rational thought and physical sensation alone. We have made every attempt to sever our soulish links and scarify our spiritual senses so that our only experience might be that which we desire. We have denied our deepest longings, ridiculed the best and holiest of our generation, embraced falsehoods knowingly all to hide from the terrible call of the deep. And so we bob gently with the tide, eyes closed, while in the limitless vastness below things move which our minds would bend to contemplate.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. ~ Genesis 1:2
The uncertainty of the moment fills everyone with gnawing unease, perhaps because we perceive beyond rationality the monumental change that is occurring. Call it what you will, the Fourth Turning or the new Axial Age or even the Soaring Twenties; we are existing in a period marked by dissatisfaction with established norms and establishments. The fires of global chaos reveal much of our assumed foundation to be made of grass, and we are now assembling the scorched pieces into ever more arcane conspiracies and revolutionary schemes. But the true change hasn’t come yet. Most are still working with the set of blocks they’ve been allowed, reshuffling the materialist paradigm over and over hoping for new solutions. We’ve run the experiment, and the Enlightenment left us in many ways less rational and more fastidiously barbarous than before. But the alternative is fearful to most of mankind, and so we continue to procrastinate at the door which leads back to most of human history and experience. Because turning the handle allows the spirit world back in.
This is the interpretation of the matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting… ~ Daniel 5:26-27
The modern pact that all humans who have ever professed spiritual experience must be delusional (and all equally mislead) is beginning to fray. Tired and harmless mainstream religious expressions are dying, and fervent sects of zealots spring up to fill the void. As we reach back out and dip deeper into the darkness beyond our carefully constructed naturalist barriers, we are painfully relearning lessons long lost to us. We are exploring anew the coves and bays that our fathers knew well, excitedly reporting their beauty and grandeur as if we were the first to witness it when the most elementary disciple of yesterday swam into far deeper waters. But we must start somewhere. Perhaps we cling to the shallows and skindive across the surface of the trenches because we still feel the ancient human fear of God. You may have heard it taught from pulpits of kind platitudes dispensing safe creeds that the fear of the Lord does not truly involve fear, that God simply wishes to be respected as a kindly cosmic elder. We are learning otherwise quickly. We are coming to the end of our adolescent phase of toying with religion as social fabric strengthener or human mind opener, too. I must be clear that nothing I am saying can be understood through the safety of a pane of ironic false intellectualism. I speak not of the happy concept of God, or the useful myth of God, but the awful presence of God.
This is the fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. ~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
It is reflexively easy for the carefully trained modern mind to reject all of this with a chuckle. I understand and cannot do all that much about it. Like any prophet, I can only relay the Word that I have heard. And if I have any prediction, it would be that the presence of metaphysical reality will no longer remain dormant by common consent in my children’s world. If God is beginning to gently invade our materialist fantasy, we are going to be brought to a number of painful decisions. After all, allowing the possibility of a metaphysical means that we have to expect, as rational people, some true Reality behind the cosmos again. None of the bland ecumenism of our parent’s generation lasts if we confront the possibility that any of this is real, any more than there could be two competing laws of gravity or orbital mechanics. And so we come to the point of decision, standing knee-deep in our cultural wading pool, enjoying the refreshment while nervously eying the water. What was that beneath our feet? What about that place where we cannot see? We are about to confront a truth that Christians have known for millennia: human beings cannot stand before God. We do not want to. As much as the internet mystic and the carefully pious may say otherwise, we carefully structure our lives so that we face as few moments of revelation as possible. Only the fervent, the immoderate, and the embarrassingly zealous go further. To discover that there is a way to descend into the true depths. Not our way, and not a way that makes us feel incredibly powerful or important. But if there was a way that you could experience Reality, how much choice could you really expect?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
~ William Blake, "The Tyger"
Moses said, "Please show me your glory." And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name 'The LORD.' And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live."
~ Exodus 33:18-20
Excellent. Reads like Lovecraft scared straight.