On Spiritual Exploration, Third Reply (Letter 6/6) The Struggle + The Event
An ongoing letter series with Theresa "Sam" Houghton of The Journey Continues
This is the third reply in a Substack letters series with Theresa “Sam” Houghton of The Journey Continues, part 6 of a 6-part discussion entitled “On Spiritual Exploration”. These letters are all about the journey of finding a life path, how winding that journey might be, and how that path has looked for us spiritually.
You can see part 5, her third letter to me, below:
Sam—
Years ago, I attended an odd retreat with about 25 others.
Dyadic meditation, the technique was called.
We paired off, each taking our turn with the question, “Who am I?”
I’d answer this question while my partner stayed nearly stone-still, a passive mirror.
They would take in my answers. They wouldn’t react. They’d barely crack a smile.
They would watch as I sought an answer.
Sought, struggled, strove, ruminated, questioned, pontificated.
And then I would watch them, when it was their turn, their five minutes to answer.
We answered, and then we listened, answered, then listened.
From one partner to another, for the bulk of a three day weekend.
The first night I felt so shaken by the experience that I had intensely vivid dreams.
And in the midst of one of those dreams, I ground a tooth so hard that I cracked it.
(Get yourself night guards, readers!)
That next day, the tooth hurt so bad that it was all I could talk about.
The tooth and the dreams.
That all I could stay present to, the tooth and the dreams.
And it actually helped. Weirdly. To only talk about the tooth and the dreams.
There was a big difference between my dyadic meditations on day one versus day two.
Because for the first day I just wanted to stay in my head. To tell my story—
“I was a philosophy major. Maybe I should have been a professor.”
Or
“My current job does nothing for me.”
Or
“My dad was very cerebral, my mom was very… whatever the opposite of that is.”
I don’t remember what I actually said, truthfully. These examples are as good as any.
All I really remember is this: I started seeing myself, my actual self, as a circle.
As I looked at my partner and spoke, I saw myself as a circle.
And then I saw my talking as a line.
The line would extend tangentially away from a point on the circle.
And that line would be getting somewhere far away from me.
It would be me, in a way, a line extending from me.
But it was my mind talking itself into thin air, into oblivion.
I was getting away from myself, losing myself, losing connection with my actual self.
And maybe it would catch itself, return and then start again, return and start again.
But it nevertheless kept getting away from me. My mind kept getting away from me.
On day two, that all changed.
My tooth was broken! It hurt like hell!
All I could talk about was that, and about the still lingering memories of my dreams.
And that was me.
I finally was beginning to answer the question, “Who am I?”
I am my broken tooth. I am the circle, not the vector.
I am what’s right here. I am what’s right now.
--
Why did I attend a retreat like this?
(I’ve had more than one friend scoff at the culty vibes that this format suggested.)
(I had to get a root canal to save the tooth, and just recently had an apicoectomy.)
Well, I went through a depression in my 28th year.
The memories I am left with from that year consist of the following, more or less:
- Asking myself daily if I had enough Facebook friends.
- Asking myself daily if I had enough friends, period.
- Asking myself daily if I had been in romantic relationships for enough years.
- Asking myself daily if I had taken a wrong turn on my career, my life path.
- Googling extensively, passively, for “ketamine treatments” and “ayahuasca retreats”.
- Working, working, working. Remembering nothing about any of it. Just hating it.
- Looking at myself in an office bathroom mirror, feeling: I am the utterest nothing.
But at some point—I don’t remember quite when—depression gave way to resolution.
Depression gave way to resolution.
It might have been just after the 2016 election, the changes I saw happening around me.
I expected Clinton to win, inexorable demographics to turn America indefinitely blue.
That didn’t happen. I wanted to understand why.
A colleague organized a hackathon in response to the election. A project of mine won.
It showed you what people on the other side of the political spectrum were saying.
It never went anywhere, this project, though I worked on it for nearly two years.
But I grew a deep intuition for the dynamics of political polarization in this country.
And these learnings brought me back to what I discussed in my previous letter, Sam:
Alienation. Loneliness. Decline of community. A reactionary backlash unleashed.
I saw that these were the forces enabling Trump, not some pure irredeemable bigotry.
These were the same forces that had led me to my own deep despair:
- Alienation: a homelessness in the world, ungrounded in identity, community, purpose.
- Loneliness: an invisibility, a struggle to be seen in a world where status is all.
- Community: once a fact of life, now needing to be searched for, and often in vain.
I am far too educated to be seduced by reactionary politics.
I am far too left to even entertain the possibility.
But did a weird part of me envy those who found meaning in a demagogue like Trump?
--
Depression gave way to resolution.
It might have been in the months that followed, the specific ways I changed.
The immediate resolution was not to find community, or anything like it.
Rather, it was a sort of tenacity of individuality.
Sure, I reconnected with friends, got over my Facebook friend count obsession.
(The fixation now seems to be almost absurd to me.)
But I didn’t find community, didn’t find meaning therein.
I instead decided: “I need to be the best me.”
I didn’t need to be the best me to optimize myself, one more optimized tech bro.
I needed to be the best me to not let my life tack towards despair.
I needed to be the best me to not grow an ever worse friend to my friends, my family.
I needed to be the best me to not burden others with my anxiety, my depression.
I started creating my life, cultivating my life to follow this resolution.
I started building a habit app for myself, for example, to make this resolution concrete.
I wanted to do the things I wanted to do, but never felt like I had time for.
I wanted to do the things I wanted to do, but felt like I was failing to do.
Failing to get my ass out of bed and make full use of the day.
Failing to write, never actually writing, just talking about how one day I’ll write.
Maybe a new app would help me make progress on this. Nothing out there fit the bill.
Maybe this intention, “a new habit app,” might sound techie-cliche, at any other time.
But it was born of a depth of despair and a countervailing strength of responsibility.
You described the choice that you had when you bottomed out and chose God, Sam.
I bottomed out and chose my health, chose my ability to choose, to chart my life.
Chose my well-being so I could be well for others.
Chose my well-being so I could, perhaps, learn to chart a path of well-being for others.
I was inspired by the Alfred North Whitehead quote:
Civilization advances by extending what we can perform without thinking.
I was inspired by the Karl Marx vision of life in a communist society:
To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner…
…just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
But we must make ourselves capable of that, no?
Capable of making a decision to do this-or-that, “just as I have a mind.”
Capable of not just watching more Netflix, not just more digital distraction.
(Does Marx’s vision of an idyllic communist society depend on better habits?)
Well in any event, this was what I was intent on.
I built that app over years. I built in myriad different techniques to motivate myself.
And look: it works. At least, it finally began to work. I’m writing now, aren’t I?
(In fact, as I write this, I am three weeks ahead of my writing goals.)
And besides the habit app, I finally did that ayahuasca ceremony, Twice.
I started exercising more. I started attending retreats like the dyadic meditation.
I started journaling regularly. I started noting and growing my subjective happiness.
My job got better, my relationships got better, my mood got better, my life got better.
And yet something big, something enormous, still felt missing.
--
Depression gave way to resolution.
It might ultimately have been when I recognized something bigger.
Recognizing I am not the change, but part of it.
Certainly not the change of our politics, but also not the change of myself.
I was letting myself be changed, letting my path be determined.
We have written together about spirituality over these several weeks, Sam.
What is spirituality?
I won’t pretend I could offer a philosophically rigorous definition in this short space.
But a working definition, a good-enough definition?
Well, I think it would have to start with this fundamental understanding:
There is something higher than yourself.
That’s pretty unobjectionable, right?
Spirituality, today, is fundamentally counterposed to egoism, egocentrism.
There is, of course, egoism in organized religion, too, not just in secular thinking.
You described a version of evangelicalism, e.g., as:
“A solution to problems or a way to achieve perfect happiness and fulfillment.”
For such people, God is just for them, for their own happiness.
They are not for God, for humankind, for truth, for anything higher than themselves.
And, you reflect, there are non-Christians who lead lives of fulfillment, too.
Who understand this “higher than oneself”.
But here’s the other part of spirituality that feels necessary to me:
…And you are of that something else.
In other words: we are not separate from, independent of that higher force.
I say we are “of”, not “part of”, not “the same as”, not simply “we are”.
Different, but the same.
You are human, but you are of God.
As you say, Sam, “All these things are... because God is.”
God is not just some outside higher force that you have to grapple with.
God may be above, transcendental, but He is also here, in the world, as Christ.
Though I am not a Christian, I always found this simultaneity of the Trinity profound.
And that is sufficient—God as transcendent Father is the higher-than-self.
God as temporal Son is the of-ness of our self in God.
But what of other modern, secular ideologies? Do they fit our criteria of spirituality?
The mainstream view of modern scientism seems like it might fit the bill, no?
There is “the universe”, right? That is higher than us, no?
And we are of the universe, no?
But this scientism does not practice what it preaches.
The universe is a site to be dominated over, to be technologically exploited, controlled.
At best, it’s an object of vague wonder, to be observed passively in Netflix docuseries.
Science is not of the universe. The universe is of science.
“Give me a lever and fulcrum long enough, and I shall move the world” - Archimedes.
But you can’t move God. You can’t move what’s higher than you, and yet of you.
--
In my last letter, I described my relationship to history, my relationship to the event.
(The substance of history is the event.)
I learned what history meant to me over that trajectory, that traversing of The Road.
I learned this over my years of study, of philosophy, politics, and spiritual engagement.
I learned the weight of history, the imperative of history.
I learned that we shared a common destiny, as a human community.
I learned our responsibility to that human community, at a moment of greatest danger.
But this was all still mostly an intellectual relationship.
What was it to really live history, for me?
What’s the difference between thinking and living a spiritual truth?
I think it’s when you let go at the point of greatest struggle.
I think it’s when you see it’s over for your former devices, your former crutches.
I think it’s when you hit the bottom, and therefore everything has to change.
That bottom point, and every major point after it, is what history is.
It is the event. It is change. It is revolution. It is decision.
So I suppose in this final letter, I seek to understand what the event really is to me.
What defines me, just as our shared history is what defines us as humans.
The event: looking at the mirror and thinking “I am the utterest nothing.”
The event: saying, “I don’t understand this, but I need to” after Trump’s election.
The event: resolving, “I will be a better person, a better friend. I need to grow.”
The event is a here and a now, as every moment is.
But it is a here and a now that is an anchor, a returning.
It is a memory that marks us forever after, recreates us forever after.
We can return to it, again and again.
We do return to it, again and again.
It is close to us, because it is us.
We are our histories. We are our accumulation of events.
--
My description for my Substack starts with “phenomenological spiritualism”.
What does that mean? “Phenomenology” is a fancy word, easy to just gloss over.
My favorite way of explaining phenomenology is as such:
- Conventional philosophy is based in rationality, the logical analysis of the world.
- Phenomenology is grounded in intuition, the actual experience of the world.
- Conventional philosophy might debate ad nauseam the objectivity of, say, free will.
- Phenomenology would instead start from, “What does it feel like? What is it to us?”
(“How does this feel?”—the first line of the first piece in my current autofiction series.)
But what would a “phenomenological spiritualism” look like?
Can I pretend to have achieved it?
No, no, it’s aspirational, deeply aspirational.
But it’s how I think of my work.
How I think of my spirituality—my experience of history, of the event.
How I think of my various projects…
…building habit tools to provide people choice over their destinies and creative efforts.
(phenomenological free will: not an instant “this”, but repeatedly decided resolution?)
…overcoming the bubbles of alienation through conversation with those around us.
…gaining greater awareness and freedom through richer emotional language.
And also how I think about the real remaining frontier: shining light on the vast inside.
We talk of going to Mars, but how little we know of what’s behind our very eyes!
How little we see what’s possible inside, that we lack the imagination or faith to explore!
And this more than anything, Sam, is why I do believe God is real.
This may sound like an odd statement.
I’ve made clear in this series that I am agnostic, a lapsed Catholic.
But it is enough for me that God is experienced—by you, by others, by so many others.
He is in you.
By you and others, God is chosen, chosen, chosen.
To have faith, one chooses Him again and again.
But what is in me, I am still figuring out, still learning.
What I am choosing, I am still figuring out, still learning.
For now, I know there is the here and the now. Those never go away.
They are what are purely there for us, if we simply look.
They are what make everything else possible.
(The future, possible by dint of the now. The far away, possible by dint of the here.)
I’ve found solace and recognition in calling them Mother Here and Father Now, lately.
Maybe they will have a different name tomorrow, or the next day.
Maybe I will commit to them, hold their names in my heart longer, for a lifetime even.
But for now this is my way of attaining the elemental dimensions of spirituality:
- A destiny: a faithfulness to growing out of the ground I set forth from, here and now.
- A divine love: to be held in the space of this here and now, to let that be enough.
- A grace: to let go of tormenting fixations on past and future, on the other-than-here.
It may change, it may evolve, it may transform again and again.
I’ve let go of my language having the last word on the world.
(The world will always be a step ahead of our words, I think.)
But whatever it will be, it will be history that makes it so.
It will be the event that makes it enduringly a part of me.
It will be here and now where it all happens.
--
And for now, here and now, I thank you for this beautiful exchange Sam.
Thank you for opening this letter series, for allowing us to tell our rich stories.
The level of openness and honesty this format has allowed us can’t be understated.
And I’m thrilled it put you in touch with those depths of spiritual honesty, as it did me.
And I thank all you readers for following along in all this.
I hope this offered food for thought for your own life journey, your own spiritual path.
To you, Sam, and to all of you, readers,
Your friend,
JG
Images created by Midjourney.
Thank you for putting so much thought into this exchange, JG. I’m glad we had a chance to explore this topic together, and I suspect there is much more to talk about as time goes on.
Like the Biblical assertion that Christians love God because He first loved them, and the multiple instances throughout scripture that state that God is the One Who chooses. I still haven’t worked through all of what that means (many theologians much smarter than I have written at length about it throughout history), but there is something very powerful in the Christian doctrine that offers a kind of assurance not found in other teachings, secular or spiritual.
Peter wrote that Christians are “kept by the power of God.“ And Jesus stated that those who come to Him will never be cast out. The Old and New Testaments assert that God will never fail or forsake His people. So there are certainly discussions to be had about the idea of choice and keeping. 🙂
It was interesting to read about your experience trying to describe who you are. I feel like that’s the fundamental question of our age, the question of identity and of where we fit. And looking at the way society has gone in the recent past, it seems like we are not able to define that for ourselves. There must be, as you said, something larger than us at work. For the more we attempt to define ourselves, the more we find our thoughts of shooting off in all directions, grasping for an anchor, trying to build a framework through which we attempt to express ideas of ourselves that are nebulous even to us.
But if we seek for God, as Paul said to the Athenians in Acts chapter 17, we find the One in Whom we live and move and have our being.