Spiritual Malnutrition and the End of Sacred Secrecy

Who gets to hear the deeper things?

Image by John Prokopiev from Pixabay

Dear Living Dark reader,

Before I get to the meat of today’s post, a couple of housekeeping items:

FIRST, I have added two new links to the main menu at this newsletter’s website: “Start Here” and “Selected Essays.” These represent new sections of The Living Dark.

• “Start Here” is for new readers, and also for anyone who would enjoy an orientation to the core concerns around here. It gathers essays spanning the earliest days of TLD to the present, encompassing a range of themes: creativity and its hidden source, silence and resistance, the daemon muse, nonduality and the instability of reality, art as both calling and trap, and the uncanny undercurrents that surface in horror, dreams, science, and spiritual inquiry.

• “Selected Essays” is intended to simplify the experience for new readers while preserving the integrity of earlier work. It collects essays from TLD’s former paid period (September 2022–January 2025). These remain accessible to original supporters as a permanent thank-you. The essays have been removed from the main archive and are now visible only in this section.

SECOND, several readers have asked me for a way to support this work materially now that there’s no paid subscription option. So, starting today, I have added a donation option at the end of posts for anyone who feels inclined. There’s no expectation, and nothing here is paywalled. This is just an opening for anyone who feels drawn to donate.

And now, on to the main post.

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On Speaking Openly in a Spiritually Thin Age

A couple of weeks ago, a reader questioned me on the advisability of publicly sharing statements of deep or esoteric spiritual knowledge. This was in response to a quote from a book of nondual teachings that I had posted to Substack Notes. It marked the second time in a couple of months that someone had raised such a concern. The first commenter expressed reservations or skepticism toward the practice of “pilling,” which was a characterization of my Notes activity that hadn’t crossed my mind before.

Forgive the pedantic aside, but on the off chance that you’re unfamiliar with the term pilling, more fully known as red pilling, it comes from The Matrix and refers to the “red pill” that Morpheus offers Neo to wake him up to the reality of the false world in which he is imprisoned. The term, including its modification into a verb, entered the cultural lexicon almost immediately upon the movie’s release in 1999 and came to mean the act of providing information in an attempt to shatter someone’s worldview. It has been most prominently associated with promoting far-right viewpoints, but my commenter was invoking the term’s broader, ideologically neutral meaning of seeking to wake people up.

When something like this comes up twice in a short span of time, it generally suggests there’s a question worth addressing.

On sharing what’s deep, and why this unsettles some readers

Is it, in fact, irresponsible or otherwise inadvisable to share fundamental spiritual knowledge or viewpoints openly and publicly? If so, then I’m very irresponsible in my online life, as a significant portion of my activity on Substack Notes consists of sharing ideas and quotations that run pretty deep. The same is true of my activity on Facebook and, previously, before I deleted my account, at the former Twitter. I’m particularly prone to posting quotations and excerpts from books of nondual teachings and philosophy, ones that I find potent, memorable, and useful as pointers and reminders.

Here’s an example, and it’s one that I haven’t chosen randomly, as it is the one that elicited the first of the reader comments mentioned above. It’s a passage from This That Is, a book of transcribed teachings by the late nondual teacher Peter Brown, whose unique expression of such things is exceptionally powerful and effective:

God does everything. God always gets exactly what it wants. God is doing exactly what is supposed to be done. And it is impossible to know what that is supposed to look like. So whatever is happening in your life is exactly what is supposed to be happening in your life—you’re exactly where you need to be. Yet you cannot know what “benevolent” or “meaningful” is supposed to look like.

Seeing the entirety of it as this one Radiant Presence of your being, your reality, your dream.

Getting caught up, getting swept up, getting distracted is IT too. It’s one of its major modes. It’s one of the flavors of radiance, of experiential qualities. So there’s no failure mode, there’s no such thing as “doing it wrong.” Doing it wrong is just another flavor of doing it “right.” Not seeing Radiant Presence is Radiant Presence. Seeing Radiant Presence is Radiant Presence. So how can you miss?

—Peter Brown, This That Is (The Open Doorway, 2022), 32.

Upon reading this at Substack Notes, my recent commenter felt moved to state a significant reservation about my act of posting such a thing for general consumption. For the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to the individual with masculine pronouns. He expressed concern and discomfort with what he experienced as a drift toward nihilism or resignation. The idea that “God does everything” felt to him like it erased moral agency and blurred the line between justice and injustice, encouraging people to accept suffering or oppression as simply their fate. He said Brown’s point in the quoted passage felt arbitrary and unsettling, like a cosmic dice game—he (my commenter) explicitly invoked the image of the Dungeon Master—whose rules and outcomes are hidden. And he worried that sharing ideas like this publicly, where people might encounter them without context or preparation, might lead to confusion or spiritual distress. He also pointed out that many wisdom traditions limit or carefully stage the transmission of deeper teachings for precisely this reason: not because the insights are false, but because they aren’t necessarily helpful or resonant for everyone.

The traditional logic of secrecy

It’s a concern that is not lost on me, and the commenter made it well. I understand it implicitly. At the same time—and here’s my whole point—I think current conditions constitute and result in a different calculus than what obtained during the time(s) in history when certain core knowledge required strict maintenance of an inner/outer, esoteric/exoteric distinction and hierarchy.

In fact, one could argue, as I am arguing here and now, that the traditional approach carries its own set of problems, both potential and actual, precisely because of its inner/outer conceptual structure. On the outer level, these problems can include misconstrual of key understandings, injurious literalizing of what is intended only metaphorically, fanatical fundamentalisms founded on such misconstruals, and a near severing of the exoteric shell from any meaningful, organic connection to its tender esoteric core. The trouble can even reach the point where those who cherish and promote the shell are unwittingly damaging the tender core that the outer layer is meant to carry and protect (though of course that core, or rather the eternal reality it represents, cannot actually be damaged). In other words, much mischief can be and has been propagated this way as well, not just via the more contemporary approach of airing for general view and consideration what was formerly held back as something exclusively appropriate for an inner circle or an elite understanding.

If you’ll forgive an extended illustration that draws on my personal religious history and upbringing:

In Christianity, the traditional approach is laid out explicitly in scripture. Consider, for example, the case of Jesus. The biblical gospels say he maintained both an outer teaching and an inner one, the latter being reserved for an inner circle of students. The clearest statement of this comes in Mark’s gospel, where, immediately after Jesus publicly tells the parable of the sower and the seeds, the narrator says, “With many such parables he spoke the word to them [that is, the general public] as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples” (Mark 4:33–34). Similar statements appear in Matthew and Luke. (But for an interesting contrast, compare John 18:20, where Jesus, while on trial before the Pharisees for supposedly teaching blasphemous doctrines, tells them, “I have spoken openly to the world. I always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard me what I said to them. They know what I said.”)

“Current conditions constitute and result in a different calculus than what obtained during the time(s) in history when certain core knowledge required an esoteric/exoteric distinction.”

Paul likewise spoke of an inner/outer distinction in Christian teaching, and in words that are much more verifiable as having actually come from him, in contrast to the unresolvable ambiguity surrounding the historical authenticity of the many sayings attributed to Jesus. This appears most prominently in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, in one of my two favorite passages in the New Testament. The document itself represents a letter that Paul wrote to the fledgling Christian church at Corinth, which he himself had planted. After telling his readers that during his previous visit with them he had deliberately abstained from exercising any rhetorical subtlety or philosophical prowess in talking with them about Christ, instead limiting his discourse to the sole focus of “Jesus Christ and him crucified” so that their faith “might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God,” he goes on to emphasize that, despite the importance of that basic element, there is a deeper layer to the message. In fact, he says this deeper layer is the whole point, the core that the outer message is meant to lead to. As he puts it, “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom.” This wisdom that is shared among “the mature” is not, he says, the wisdom of the world, but “God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” Its specific content is that “we have the mind of Christ”—in other words, that Christians know God’s inner mind through God’s own Spirit, just as each individual human directly knows the interiority of his or her own thoughts.

Paul emphasizes that the discourse about these things among mature believers transcends the forms of human wisdom and philosophy that were widely known throughout the first-century Roman imperial culture in which he and his readers were living. “We speak of these things,” Paul says, referring to the inner Christian truth, “in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.” In other words, Paul says the inner core of Christian wisdom is a transcendent mystery that goes beyond not only the forms and philosophies of the Greco-Roman world, but beyond even the outer form of the Christian way itself with its foregrounding of “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He compares the latter to milk for infants—that is, baby food—and contrasts it with the “solid food” that is the more appropriate nourishment for spiritually mature persons.

There are other New Testament invocations of the same point. Consider, for instance, Jesus’s famous instruction not to “cast your pearls before swine,” generally interpreted as a warning against sharing spiritual wisdom with people who aren’t prepared to appreciate or understand it. Or consider his statement to the Pharisees in Chapter 17 of Luke’s Gospel, in two verses that constitute my other favorite passage in the New Testament. The Pharisees ask Jesus when God’s kingdom will arrive. In its context, they’re asking when God will overthrow Rome and reinstall Israel’s power in an earthly, visible, political kingdom. Jesus gives them a forthrightly spiritual and mystical answer to this worldly question: “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within [or among] you” (Luke 17:20–21). In other words, he calls out and contradicts the very premise of their question by asserting that the rule and realm of God is something internal, not something to be looked and longed for in an objective arrival of physical and political conditions.

The relationship of this saying to the issue at hand becomes even clearer when we compare it to its near-parallel in the Thomas Gospel, where it’s not the Pharisees but Jesus’s disciples who ask him when the kingdom will come. His answer recalls but alters the canonical version: “It will not come while people watch for it; they will not say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘Look, there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and men do not see it” (Thomas 113). In other words, the kingdom, rule, or realm of God is already present for those who have eyes to see it. And this of course means it’s far different from what people commonly conceive. The secret-ish tone of this saying, its status as something intended only for an inner circle of advanced students, is made even clearer when we consider that the Gospel of Thomas opens on page one by announcing, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.”

An autobiographical illustration

To explain why I land where I do on the question of sharing deep spiritual teachings with a general audience instead of keeping them secret, I need to step back and say something personal. Every time I revisit these matters, I think of how amazed my teenage self would have been to hear the “secret things” openly taught, preached, exposited, and emphasized. Certainly, the whole Bible was the official text of my childhood church, which was a mainstream Protestant evangelical organization. And I’m sure that at some point, some of the passages discussed above made their way into one or more sermons, teachings, lessons, or sets of Sunday School or youth group material (except for the Thomas material). But whenever and however they did, their revolutionary import certainly wasn’t emphasized. As I understood things, after you had privately believed and publicly proclaimed before the assembled local congregation that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” followed by water baptism via full immersion, the Christian life consisted of continuing to attend church services, participate in church social life, live morally, read your Bible, and pray. I understood things this way because that’s how they were taught to me in both explicit instruction and cultural atmosphere. The idea that there was something deeper, something mystical, something more like the revolutionary secret wisdom that Paul and Jesus talked about, simply wasn’t there.

For someone possessed of an innately philosophical temperament like I was, someone for whom this temperament would bloom into a raging desire for answers in his late teen years and afterward, this all laid the groundwork for an immense receptivity to the kinds of things presented by the likes of Alan Watts and others who brought Eastern philosophical and spiritual teachings—and not just that, but high-level philosophical and psychological concepts and insights from across the East-West divide—to popular awareness in American culture during the heady period of the middle and late twentieth century. It also engendered a desire to dispense with small talk and cut right to the chase, right to the quick, whenever dealing with spiritual matters. Long youthful years filled with a yearning for something deeper, even as I lacked a sufficient vocabulary for understanding or articulating the yearning, instilled in me an enduring predilection for bringing those deeper things out into the public arena and making them central.

Spiritual malnutrition and why the calculus has changed

Because, after all, what might happen if nobody emerged as spiritually mature? What would it be like if the exoteric form of a religion began to propagate itself in the absence of its inner core? What would it look like for a church, or a movement, or a philosophical school, to blunder on through sheer force of inertia, continually propping up its outer forms, now become the only forms, and self-proclaiming them as being the thing itself, the whole package? What might that look like in, say, a Protestant evangelical context in the Missouri Ozarks during the 1970s and 1980s? And what might that feel like for someone who hungered for something more, something deeper, without being able to say what exactly that might be, or even to name the desire itself because of the very deficiencies of the tradition that created and failed to fulfill it? Wouldn’t such a person have been overjoyed to hear deeper “secret” truths being offered?

In my own case, it’s also on-point to ask: Would such a person possibly find in the literary vehicle of weird and cosmic horror fiction an interrogation and articulation of these deep truths that could speak to that hunger and give it resonant new forms in which to express itself, albeit founded on emotions and intimations of transcendent terror and horror rather than cosmic comfort—which, come to think of it, are likewise to be found in the deeper understanding of Christianity?

What this autobiographical detour makes clear, at least to me, is that my inclination to speak and write openly about putatively esoteric, advanced, or secret spiritual truths isn’t motivated by a sheer desire to provoke people, to “wake them up.” Instead, it’s driven by a long familiarity with what happens when depth is withheld altogether, when little to nothing is provided to speak to the deeper hunger that exists within us. The value in using contemporary channels to share things like Peter Brown’s words on God, quoted above, is that this addresses what may be the primary spiritual issue of the age, at least here in the culture where I live and in which/to which I’m speaking. The issue isn’t confusion, though there is indeed a great deal of that. Rather, it’s spiritual malnutrition, a culture saturated with religious, spiritual, and philosophical language but often starved of real, lived insight.

So, returning to the initial concern from my commenters: Certainly, the same key factors and principles that have led people throughout history to create a division between the esoteric and exoteric, and to carefully shield the former from general public consumption, are still in place and always will be. Upon hearing or reading “deep” teachings, some people will understand, while others won’t. And the risks of misunderstanding in both directions are still fully present. There’s no getting away from that. But, as I said, I’m of the opinion that present conditions, not only unique to me and my personal history and formation, but characteristic of the culture at large, have shifted the calculus and made the public sharing of those formerly reserved formulations of truth potentially more valid and helpful than harmful. And even, to an extent, needful.

In fact, I think that’s one of the most interesting characteristics of the present age with its influx of formerly secret teachings into mainstream discourse, reaching at least as far back as the late nineteenth-century birth of Theosophy and extending forward to the current era of spiritual writing, teaching, and publishing with its Jiddu Krishnamurtis, Eckhart Tolles, and other prominent figures who speak nondual and other high-level wisdom to a mass audience.

It’s like Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit priest and theologian, famously said in the 1960s, in a statement whose import still holds today: “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’—someone who has ‘experienced something’—or will cease to be anything at all.” In other words, a purely doctrinal, and thus exoteric, Christianity isn’t something that can even survive anymore. It has played itself out and found all its own dead ends, in tandem with the shifting and evolving of its various cultural and civilizational conditions. The time has come when the “mysticism” that was formerly reserved for a few must now become the dominant approach of the many.

This holds true not just for Christianity. Rahner’s point expands beyond the frame in which he advanced it, becoming a point of general importance. At least that’s how I see it.

Warm regards,

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