The Narrow Way
Tomorrow’s event:
Creating Structure to Support Self-Maturation: A Monastic View w/ Jasna Seishin Todorović. January 9th @ 11:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Consciousness and Spirituality Explained: Part 1 w/ Frank Heile. January 9th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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January 8th, 2021
Socrates was being nice to me yesterday. He was rubbing against me, all friendly like, which is unusual for him. He is a strange cat, and usually bites me, or does these hit and runs, in the spirit of play, or at least I like to think it is.
Friendly Socrates was nice to experience, and around the time he was being friendly to me, my body started to feel peaceful. This was around 10 PM, and the peaceful feeling was starting to feel unusual. It started to feel like a “holy peace,” or at least those were the words that came to me when describing what I was feeling to Camille.
I suddenly remember that Orthodox Christmas was happening soon, but I did not know what day, so I checked my phone and sure enough it was Christmas day for us Orthodox Christians. I was wearing a bathrobe at the time, one that I do not usually wear, and in one of the pockets I found a prayer rope that I forgot about. I took this as a sign, then prayed.
When synchronicity type things happen like this, my mind usually rushes to find “a story” of why what happened has happened. While I was baptized in the Orthodox Church, I am not an active Church-goer, but I do feel like it is my spiritual home. Maybe I am plugged in to the spiritual lineage somehow, and was picking up on something. I do not know, and sometimes you do not need to know, you just need to let things be.
The following Christian phrase popped in my mind after that, which I am surprised I have not written about here before, because I talk about the phrase a lot with my friends, and that phrase is the “narrow way.” Here is Matthew 7:13-14 from the King James Version:
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
I always found this metaphor very clean and sharp. The broad way, is the easy way, the common way. It is the way the demons get you. The narrow way, in contrast, is difficult to walk on, but it is the way that leads to a holy peace.
While the Stoics are a part of my philosophical tradition, I do turn to my spiritual home to seek its wisdom from time to time, and the words from St. Basil the Great seem relevant at the moment: Hell can't be made attractive, so the devil makes attractive the road that leads there.
That is why the broad road is full of scintillating supernormal stimuli, and this is why porn sites are in the top-visited sites in the world. Porn, or as Father Seraphim Rose calls it, the “Devil's Iconography,” is the “deathwork” of our culture, or better said, our anti-culture.
I know I might be sounding like some crazed anti-porn Christian lobbyist here, but I am not anti-porn necessarily. I have watched my share, and I am somewhat optimistic it can be used for good, if created or used with care. I do think the bulk of it is a deathwork though, Philip Rieff’s term I have written about before, which I defined as: works of art that undermine the sacred underpinnings of a society.
I think porn, in its popular manifestation, is like the male gaze on steroids, and a lot of it is violent towards women, which I assume is serving as a perverse way for heterosexual men to take out their relational frustrations on women. If you want to create a world of what Martin Buber calls “I-It relationships,” where we instrumentalize each other, especially in a way that creates a “war of the sexes,” then for men’s part, watching modern porn is a great practice for this.
Byung-Chul Han—my favorite philosopher at the moment—is probably the philosopher that is best tracking the symptoms of Empire, or to use Jack Donovan’s phrase, The Empire of Nothing. Han writes about the pornographication of society, and how the exhibitive nature of porn destroys the erotic, which requires mystery:
Indeed, exhibition destroys any and all possibilities for erotic communication. A naked face without mystery or expression—reduced simply to being on display—is obscene and pornographic. Capitalism is aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display.
He writes later on in the book:
What is pornographic is precisely the lack of contact and encounter with the Other. Instead, auto-erotic contact and auto-affection protect the ego from being touched or seized by the Other. Consequently, pornography intensifies narcissification.
In essence, porn, and our pornified anti-culture, works against the sacred, and if my working theory is correct, what is sacred is what brings us together, truly together. What brings us together is not the smooth naked fuck bodies, on display with an instrumentalized knowingness. A mystery is needed, with the recognition that we are a mystery to even ourselves.
This is the basis of communitas. We will need to start creating lifeworks to engage in “communitas crafting,” and remove deathworks from our lives, or at least attempt to repurpose them in clever ways. I suspect the way back to the sacred, and back to communitas, will be a narrow one.
Maybe then we can experience a holy peace together.
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