“This is why man is a stranger to himself today. He lacks what really belongs to him: the world of silence in which he can meet the inexplicable.” -Max Picard

In the ancient world, encountering a man with his head bowed and thumb in motion invoked an icon of deep contemplation: a dedicated Christian reciting the Jesus Prayer, gently resting his thumb on each knot of a prayer rope and conversing with God.

Today, we see the same image of bowed heads and flitting thumbs, but the purpose is inverted: no longer a silent deepening, but a frantic and shallow escape. Instead of tentatively working through knotted prayer ropes, we clutch sleek phones and abandon ourselves to the whispers of the world. Instead of gathering our minds to the simple words of prayer, we scatter through images, fleeing like the prodigal from our true purpose of communion with the Existing One.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed “the medium is the message” implying that it is not the content of our devices that truly alters us, but the form, the nature of the device itself, and the demands it makes on our attention. The screen, notifications, and infinite scrolling have radically altered our brains and our behavior. In this light, digital mediums are not just neutral messengers but powerful forces, shaping the patterns of our lives and shifting the balance of our senses away from natural embodied perception. Totally removing ourselves from our devices has become practically impossible, and impractical for most, but to stay human, we must become more vigilant and aware of the ways these tools are shaping our souls.

“Learn to know the spirit of the age, study it, so whenever possible you will be able to avoid its influence.” - St. Ignatius Brianchaninov

In his prescient book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes: “The Net may be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into use”. The artificial environment it creates draws us away from incarnate virtues into a virtual reality, which becomes all consuming, affecting our relationships to ourselves, our neighbor and our Creator. The contemporary use of technology such as “smart” phones and the resulting social media threaten to become the default of our waking life. But this new normal isn’t normal. The digitization of every waking moment has hypnotized us into a hyper-reality of infinite cares, ceaselessly catering to our cravings, even creating new desires, ex nihilo.

The warfare is not simply psychological, but spiritual. Through the promise of a technological paradise, the invasive cyber-culture has systematically shattered our sense of personhood, creating a new world of organized distractions. In 2024, Americans spent an average of 5 hours per day on their phones, checking them, on average, every 4 minutes. While the railroad, telephone, and car changed our relationship to ourselves and our surroundings, nothing has so radically transformed our noetic life as much as the introduction of personal internet devices, to the extent Christians are in danger of being shaped more by algorithms than the life of the Church.

The ancient, yet ever-relevant writings of the Desert Fathers teach us that attention (prosoche) is the beginning of spiritual life and the root of repentance, going as far to say that distraction is the “original sin” of the mind. Adam’s fall from Paradise began the moment he diverted his attention from God and attempted to grasp creation on his own. Patristic teachings and biblical literature echo our call back to Paradise as a call to watchfulness: “Attend to thyself that there be no hidden, iniquitous word in your heart” (Deuteronomy 15:9). Without attention, prayer is impossible, and our repentance remains stuck on the surface, never digging deep enough, or becoming still enough to reach the roots of our passions. Being fixated on the surface of things we lose awareness of their deeper meanings and objectify things and people, seeing only that which satisfies our demands for pleasure.

We find a similar teaching in the story of the Prodigal son who left the homeland of his attention and dispersed his spiritual inheritance, casting it into the temporal things of this world, and ending up in a mire of compulsive desires that can never be satisfied. The substance referred to here is the very same grace that we receive through Holy Baptism and cultivate through attentive living in the Church. The ceaseless flow of images and information on our devices tempts us from internal stillness, towards a mired mirage of the meaning of life, leaving us existentially empty and sucking on the dried husks of passive pleasure-seeking.

Fashioned as priests of creation, we were created as mediators between heaven and earth. The human, made in the image of God, is continually called to grow in likeness towards its archetype: Christ. This means uprooting the weeds in our heart, collecting our scattered attention, becoming clear conduits of God’s energies and thereby sanctifying the world around us. Through black pocket mirrors we have constructed digital doppelgängers, idols of ourselves, and trusting in them, have become like them (Psalm 115:8), reducing our created depth to 1’s and 0’s. Living in the consequences of the Fall, we mediate from screen to screen, not knowing up from down. This makes a screen of the whole world, diminishing its dimensions to shallow appearances.

In Adam there was no double-thought, he looked at things and saw them as they were. In our fallen state ‘imagination’ becomes mixed up with double think: we look at things and imagine something else. We define and fashion ourselves, distorting our self-image and thus the cosmic image, being trained to consume and be consumed by others. St. John Chrysostom writes in the 4th century what is relevant in the 21st: “Just as those who are in darkness are unaware of the nature of things, so too do those who live in sin fail to distinguish between things, they run towards shadows as towards reality.”

Unable to live vulnerably with real neighbors, we have created our own virtual worlds to enclose ourselves. Virtual relationships are replacing real relationships, excluding the need for a body to stay connected with others, yet at real costs. Without the body, we lose the authentic struggle of awkwardness and vulnerability that comes with being in the same space as others. Instead, we open ourselves up to a legion of online relationships, fleeing our inner brokenness by multiplying our connections to strangers and inhabiting an echo chamber of fake personalities. These superficial relationships never touch the deeper recesses of the person where our loneliness is felt the strongest. 12% of Americans report having no close friends (2025).

The destruction of community life is both a result and cause of our dependence on devices. Walking around public spaces, we are surrounded by people pulled into their screens, fleeing the demands of seeing and being seen by others. In our homes, the use of devices divides attention away from our family relations. Childhood is shrinking. 58% of children now have their own tablet by age 4 (2024). It is common to see couples sitting next to each other, absorbed in their own private world of entertainment. We often choose to ignore the unpredictable presence of a real human in favor of predictable virtual ones. 71% of people spend more time with their device than with their significant other (2021). Our devices allow us to be contacted at any moment while we lose actual contact with those immediately next to us. Christ warns us: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Where is our treasure? Let us remind ourselves “how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” (Psalm 133:1)

The Fathers of the Church teach that silence is the language of heaven. The heart, being the place of heaven, is opened and made pure by silence; Not an empty silence but a profoundly full silence that continually glorifies God. To remain in silence is simultaneously the simplest and most difficult endeavor, made impossible by the constant itching of notifications and imaginary demands from our devices. Distancing ourselves from silence separates us from God, who speaks in the “still, small voice”(Kings 19:12). The activists of the world shout: “Silence is violence!” and they are right. Real, living silence dismantles the webs of the world woven from vain cares, waking us from the narcotic of constant noise that numbs our self-knowledge.

We can rediscover the virtues of silence and solitude in the Orthodox practices of ceaseless prayer (hesychia) and watchfulness (nepsis). Through attentiveness to ourselves we learn to avoid demonic distractions, eventually coming to know our weaknesses and detect the traps of invasive thoughts. Without stillness and watchfulness self-knowledge is impossible.

“Only when we have their attention, can we hope to win their hearts and minds”. – Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

Acedia, directly translates from Greek as “carelessness”. Known by the Desert Fathers as the ‘demon of noonday’, acedia is not merely slothfulness, but a shallow restlessness and dissatisfaction that provokes its victim towards work and rest simultaneously, leaving one in a constant state of agitation. The 4th century ascetic Evagrius Ponticus writes that acedia is “hatred of industriousness, a battle against stillness.. laziness in prayer, a slackening of ascesis, untimely drowsiness... the oppressiveness of solitude, hatred of one’s cell, an adversary of ascetic works, an opponent of perseverance, muzzling of meditation, ignorance of the scriptures, a partaker in sorrow.” Acedia is the sleepless demon unleashed by the upward swipe of infinite scroll.

Our technological age has pulled us into a constant state of uneasiness without any detectable root. What is left of our inner lives has become shapeless and susceptible to powerful commercial forces which take the place of traditional cultural. (Even Steve Jobs refused to let his kids have iPads.) The algorithm breeds acedia making us restless through a constant stream of constructed content, every new swipe promising what it can never deliver: peace. For this, we need to participate in eternal wisdom.

Amidst the digital flood, the Orthodox Church provides an ark for our lives, weathering the storms of every age, and purifying our senses through her time-tested therapies. While gawking at screens and tapping icons confuses us with a false sense of communion, venerating the Holy Icons and participating in Divine Services unites our hearts with the heavenly world. The Church’s fasts encourage us to replace mindless consumption with noetic nutrition. In her steadfast presence, the Church prophetically shows forth the luminous silence of the eternal life to come, inviting all towards theosis: deification in Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. St. Justin Popovich writes “The mission of the Church is to make every one of her faithful, organically and in person, one with the Person of Christ, to turn their sense of self into a sense of Christ”. We shouldn’t despair, nor yearn for older times. In the words of St. Ambrose of Optina: “Everyone is born at the time that is best suited for his or her salvation”. With the tides of worldly technology swelling, we are wise to find sanctuary in the living body of the Church. By partaking in the Divine life, no more conformed to electric light of the world, our scattered attention is restored through the pure light of the Holy Trinity. Being transformed in the renewal of our minds (Rom 12:2), possessing and possessed by the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16).

Let us attend!

“The psychological trials of dwellers in the last times will be equal to the physical trials of the martyrs. In order to face these trials, we must be living in a different world.” - Fr. Seraphim Rose

Recommended Reading:

The New Media Epidemic by Jean Claude Larchet

Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus by Gabriel Bunge

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Please consider printing this article as a zine and sharing it in its true form.

Lefttoourowndevices

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Remain true to ancient dreams
As acorns of oak born anew.
Of Holy Water as sprinkled dew,
Prepares the flower for resurrection.

Remain true to unsung virtue.
The emerald light, as seen by few,
Is brighter than the sunward view,
And warms the Northern cold horizon.

Follow your compass, your inward sight;
It seeks the pole of eternal thought,
Perpendicular to the worldly night,
Towards the Spring your elders sought.

Further, fill your cup, and overflow.
The Logos waits at Jacob's well,
The hour is coming and now prevails,
When waking, we shall be unveiled.

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” - Ludwig Feuerbach

If the Manhattan Project was the hermetically sealed ritual that demolished the metaphysics of the old world, 2001: A Space Odyssey played the cinematic role of presenting the public with a right of passage into a new vision of the future, merging man and technology and reversing the meaning of Apocalypse. Both events served to propel the imagination into a reality beyond the senses, proposing an explosive potential within every micron, and dreamlike worlds beyond the firmament of our common experience. It wasn’t the bomb, or outer space that mattered. It wasn’t even matter that mattered anymore. The narrative was king. And the in order to bring in the new narrative, the old had to be destroyed.

The old world screen was the sky, decorated with incomprehensible beauty; the firmament holding the waters of divine infinity at bay. Instead of looking up we now look down, at the firmament phone holding the demonic infinity at bay.

During the premiere of 2001 in 1968, audiences on LSD flocked to the film, returning for multiple visits. After noticing the trend in viewership, the studio gave the movie a new tagline: “The Ultimate Trip” advertising it as the Homerian epic of the 20th century, a siren call towards a new worldview; calling the ship of our “old beliefs” towards the sharp, fragmenting rocks of a disincarnate vantage point. The movie didn’t just serve as an escape from the decline of the West, it attempted to project the entire psyche of western man into a living scientific fantasy.

The movie deserves a much more thorough unpacking of the myriad layers of symbolism and propaganda. Buried within every frame of Kubrick’s prelude to the moon-landing is an entire essay of commentary. But this article is really only about one element of the film, and primarily what the film itself represents: the screen.

By 1968, America, and most of the West was already living within a scientific world. The “bomb” had been dropped, the wars had been fought, the Machine was churning, identity was crumbling. Yet religion still crept in the minds of men, seeking a home to haunt. 2001 was science giving birth to its own religion. A religion of mixture, fluidity, quantum leaps, self-authority. The religion was called: globalism. Now so overused that we don’t even blink. No one told us this, it crept in on little cat feet, an invisible fog that began to intoxicate all who dared inhale.

In 1969, a year after the biggest movie of the century was released, we “landed on the moon” and Americans were given a massive peek at the icon of the new world,🌎 a shiny globe, on the new icon screen: the television. ‘69 was the perfect year to invert reality. Up became down. 6 became 9. The spectacle replaced the evident. The Earthly experience became something we could stand outside of, at least hypothetically.

Ever since Descartes put the horse in front of himself and Kant skeptically thought himself into a prison of his own thinking, we’ve been edging towards a complete renovation in our understanding of the world “out there”. Not just “out there” in space but even the way we perceive the sun coming through our windows.

“[With the globe] meaning does not lie in the relational context of the perceiver’s involvement in the world, but is rather inscribed upon the outer surface of the world by the mind of the perceiver. To know the world, then, is a matter not of sensory attunement but of cognitive reconstruction. And such knowledge is acquired not by engaging directly, in a practical way, with the objects in one’s surroundings, but rather by learning to represent them, in the mind, in the form of a map.” -Tim Ingold

What Ingold is describing here is the apotheosis of the Kantian worldview. The world become the construct of imaginary forces relayed into our brain machines to produce hallucinatory qualities. The map becomes the territory.

“Thus, as cosmology gives way to technology, the relation between people and the world is turned inside out, so that what was a cosmos or lifeworld becomes a world – a solid globe – externally presented to life. In short, the movement from spherical to global imagery corresponds to the undermining of cosmological certainties and the growing belief in, and indeed dependence upon, the technological fix. It is a movement from revelation to control, and from partial know- ledge to the calculated risk.” - ibid

The Cross….getting to the point.

The crucifixion as a central event in history, both literal and mythological, transcends history itself, fashioning itself as the incarnational hub of all existence, sucking every sober conscience towards its unending mystery. The Word Himself died on the cross so that everything unreal could be destroyed: since everything unreal is asleep, dead, static, dark, pointless. The Cross is the elephant in the room that shatters the room itself. The Cross is the real atomic bomb that destroys both space and time, smashing our idols and breaking wide open the way towards Life.

When we turn from this event, this Cross, away from Christ, reality becomes a screen, an avoidance of our true calling. We stop participating with Christ, and avert our eyes towards simulacrum. When we turn away from metanoia, (the turning towards Christ), we turn away from making ourselves truly present. Here becomes “out there”. And so does our home. Earth, strangely an anagram of “heart”, becomes all head, discombobulated and wobbling. We become untethered, disincarnate, distrustful of our everyday senses and more trusting towards our smooth and shiny devices.

In Nietzsche’s words:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried: “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods to decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Our engagement in the transcendent meaning of life cannot come from mere attention of things and events, but in participation with life. The difference between attention and attending is profound and teleologically infinite. Understanding this difference is in fact tantamount to our own view of salvation. Even the demons in the story of the demoniac were aware of Jesus Christ as the Lord of the Universe, they were attentive to him but they were not participating with, attending with Jesus Christ as the Lord of the Universe. They are not joined with him at the eternal banquet, they are watching him on Zoom.

Attending has been replaced with attention. Such a tiny difference might seem trivial, but the implications of this gap is the anti-mustard seed which grew the tree of forgetfulness and has thrown us out of the garden of our senses. We no longer attend paradise, we pay “attention” to it because we are outside of it, submerged into the oblivion of a parallel digital world. And this parallel world came to a head in the middle of the 20th century when the buildings we live in harkened towards the monolithic copies of the devices we were to scroll on.

The decline of architecture and the decline of the mind are one and the same. We don’t just dwell on things, we dwell in them. The architecture of our thoughts reflect itself in the shapes of our buildings.

Just look at the dwellings that our culture has vaunted over the last century and you will find a correlate in the thoughts that have been promoted. As a mind needs a body, so an idea needs an architecture. Thus, as our architecture proclaims with pride: we are living increasingly in a world without context, an unmoored existence with no set of coordinates for meaning. In the world we left behind all things, whether intellectual or physical exist within a space, a gestalt that gives each thing a right relationship to everything else. To take something out of its space, to remove the context is to take away its relationship with life itself.

It’s as if a giant black artifact from science-mythos world is attempting to take over our ability to participate.

Likewise, the things of this world, when they are removed from a relationship with their creator, promise a deceptive fulfillment that they are incapable of delivering. The story of the Garden is the archetypal echo of the story we continue to play out day after day in this eighth millennium. Far deeper than a finger wagging, moralistic fable, the Fall is an ontological event, showing the timeless impact of a choice to place our attention on ourselves, even to worship ourselves, rather than God. The sap from the tree is still stuck on our thumbs, as we endlessly scroll our devices, seeking an infinite other than the Infinite Himself. Our attention has not corrected course, it has multiplied into a care for the 10,000 things, as we all stumble around with our heads bowed towards the bitten apple in our hands. Man’s original purpose was to be the mediator between the Earth and Heavens. We still carry this calling, but we are more distracted than ever.

The Way is alone in the Garden. 
Long ago, in the beginning, 
He had been abandoned by man in the Garden: 
Man had turned away from Him,
Departing from the primal Simplicity, 
Fragmenting his nature, 
Scattering himself in thoughts, imaginations, and desires. 
- Christ the Eternal Tao (Chapter 13) 

A dead battery on my phone is a blessing, an opportunity for repentance, to return to the sanity of stillness, towards the cross, that North Star of incarnational attention. But I admit, as one ruled by my worst desires, I instinctively plug it back in. I act from a foreign center, and awaiting the reassuring glowing fruit. My precious! Maybe, if I put my ear to the dead screen, I could hear the tormented phantoms of distraction, dying beneath a lack of attention. The tricky elves in the machine, surface as shadows alongside the memory of our forgetfulness, combining to reveal a stench buried deep beneath calloused garments of skin. And we, rubbing our eyes, are just beginning to smell the puss from an ancient wound flooding into our world. 

Many, including myself, are willfully oblivious to the flooding of the cultural ship. The waters have reached the neck. If it weren’t for the brilliance of ancient theology, more specifically, for the vision of ancient Christianity, I wouldn’t have anything valuable to say here. If it weren’t for those who cast off the world to follow the cross, we would all be lost. If it weren’t for the smell of roses, we wouldn’t know the stench of sin.

In my essay on the return of the flat earth, I attempted to demonstrate the distorting effects of living within a dis-embodied cosmology, and that the things our modern culture labels as ‘crazy’ might be bringing us a medicine. The essay was something I’d been trying to frame for a while, namely, the connection between our senses and our sense of the archetypal. There seems to be an interface gap between our sensible reality and the intelligibility of what lies beyond. The reasons are legion and the history of the widening of this gap goes back millennia, arguably into the Garden of Eden where we first chose illusion over Reality.

Student: “How did Adam think? What do the Fathers say his state of mind was?

Blessed Seraphim Rose: “It was a state called sobriety: nepsis in Greek. In other words, he looked at things and saw them the way they were. There was no double thought…in our fallen state ‘imagination’ becomes mixed up with double-thinking: looking at things and imagining something else.”

Everything is symbolic.

The problem with modern thinking is that it applies the symbolic on top of reality, as a glossy finish. My argument here is: The symbol is reality itself in its fullness. This slight aberration of frame, the one that views the symbol as a veneer of meaning, has led to enormous consequences for the quality of our perception. It has exacerbated the “globalized” thinking that turns the world upside down, spins it around, and strips the meaning from words like “up” into psychological orientations, far fallen from their original meaning as architectural orientations of our cosmology.

But there is good news. The answer to this conundrum lies in ancient cosmology, in the way our forefathers understood the world not as distant observers on the outside of the world, but as active participants within the world. As Alexander Schmemann describes in his essay Sacrament and Symbol: “To be ‘symbolical’ belongs thus to its ontology, the symbol being not only the way to perceive and understand reality, a means of participation.”

For most of my life I’ve stared at two kinds of screens. As a UX designer in my twenties, I had no idea that an icon was anything else than a pleasantly shaped, clickable logo, with a well designed gradient. Had I traveled back 1000 years, I would have found a completely different experience of icons. For the ancient cultures, (primarily the original Christian Orthodox tradition), the icon, portraying a saint or sacred event was bathed in gold, usually found in a church. Instead of tapping on these icons with our thumbs, we kissed them with our lips, venerating the saint depicted, communing with the Archetype of Christ as a window into heaven. These icons were, and still are, windows into the sacred, manifesting the events, objects, and people who display the fullness of what this entire experience of human is oriented towards.

Let’s consider that we’re always staring at an icon screen. In fact we are each a moving icon, a walking kingdom of heaven, attending to Creation, kissing or scrolling, we are always participating with something, the eye of our heart is always gazing. How easy it is to bow our heads to the wrong screen. How hard it is to be still. To be silent. May God help us.

More on that later.

Which way modern man?

“Something has been opened out by Humanism, a tremendous problem put before us. Man has had enough of a life cut off from its religious center, and a quest for a new religious balance, a spiritual deepening will begin; in no order of his activity can he carry on any longer merely on the surface, a purely external life. He must go deep or peter out altogether, and after the trials and shocks he has sustained a deepening seems to be indicated.” - Nicolas Berdayev, The End of Our Time

Do you feel it? I feel it.

In the nauseating equality-binge of post-modernism, we’re being brutally confronted with ourselves as inescapable centers of consciousness, cast into the world-stage of neon ideologies. The fourth wall is broken, shattered, and revealed as a mirror. Everything is flattened, every ideology is laid abreast every other one. Every movie, every book, every cliche is abusively meaningful, pitting our meta-consciousness in a battle against itself. It is not so much the world that terrifies us, but the choice, the paralyzing cornucopia of options; with no obvious center but ourselves; all begging the question: what do I pay attention to, what do I worship? Where do I gaze? My naval is numb.

If providence finds you reading this, you are undeniably, infected with this particular virus of self-awareness, alongside the irony, tragedy, and meta-culture that comes with the Meme of being awake. We’ve been cast from the garden of our ancestors who, while also infected with choice, had a much more limited wardrobe of garments to put on. As we scroll through the options presented on the screen, we are keen to ask what this word freedom even means, and if we posses more or less of it than our “unenlightened” great-grandparents.

This standing naked in front of the mirror of self-awareness, is not absolutely wrong in itself. We are all naked before God, flaws and all. And thats a good thing. God foresaw the end in the beginning. Not just any end, this end. Post-modernism is the one, possibly final chapter of the great narrative, the narrative of our inevitable return towards the center of Being, towards the fullness of who we are. But this nakedness before ourselves is tricky. It points us dangerously towards a relativism, a worship of ourselves, rather than a relationship to the Absolute. We may be the center of our own reality, but we are blind. We think we can be gods without God. We think we see.

“For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.” John 9:39

Many of us are tempted to say your center is not my center to those we disagree with. And just as dangerously, we are just as quick to identify our center with those we hold in allegiance. This choice of centers is part and parcel of the free-will that we have been given to choose where to place our trust, our faith, our worship. But the very notion of center, begs an even deeper question. What is THE CENTER?

Post-modernism is liberating. And this is exactly what makes it dangerous. Liberated from the stories we cast off as “dogmatic” we relativize everything, ironically thinking ourselves to be free of dogma when we proclaim “everything is relative”. As Robert Anton Wilson exclaimed, “‘Reality’ is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.” And he is right, in the same way that Nietzsche is right, exclaiming that God is dead. They both speak towards the ability of man to fashion his own worldview and of the arrival of this worldview here and now.

“You are the master who makes the grass green” -Robert Anton Wilson

But what if I don’t want to be the master who makes the grass green?

Wilson, who I once adored, is a clever prophet of post-modernism, a shaman of the anti-contextual age. His gospel of selecting your own reality tunnel, creates a euphoria of subjective possibility. The same euphoria of a child, who is told they can select any candy they want from the candy store. For the well-raised child, this might happen on their birthday, for the modern-adult, this freedom rushes in every moment. We begin to wonder, is this deluge of freedom actually “freedom”? Why do I still feel so enslaved? Why do I now have diabetes?

If the last three years have shown us anything (note: it’s 2023), they have shown us the reality of programmed narratives and the sway these narratives hold over the psyche of their adherents. Furthermore, these years have revealed that we are far closer to the religiously worshipping mindset of our ancestors than our progressive minds assures us. If in 2020, you reimagined hand sanitizer as holy water, you would see that we haven’t truly progressed away from a worshipping mentality, we have only changed the context. A context that the wheels of post-modern, globalization are spinning to erase, while at the same time creating more of, albeit in an inverted fashion.

Before I converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, I believed that I was approaching the center of everything. But it truly was the center of my ego. Beset by thirst from wandering in the ideological desert and masticating on the rotted husk of every possible worldview, I approached the false summit of my own “ingenuity”.

It took me even longer to look up from myself and see the true summit of Reality looming much further than 144,000 cubits above me.

Something lifted my head up. It wasn’t my own hand.

I intend to explore the underpinnings of our collective disorientation throughout this blog. Hopefully in a way that is unique and refreshing to this audience. And offer if I may, my own simple answer: we must return to Christ. Not the sentimental, watered-down, sappy, buddy Jesus, but the Jesus Christ who created everything, and was willingly murdered by his own creation so that death could die. This Christ, is a stumbling block for many, and I had spent most of my life trying to fashion this Christ in my own image, making Him to be whoever makes me feel the most comfortable, until now.

Here’s where I’m getting at with this post: Man in the 21st century, must return to Christ (yes: Christ), boldly, even intelligently, in full awareness of his choice and the reactions a materialistic society. Those who find Christ, the person, in this 8th millennium, carry the fullness of experience of failure, not just in their own loves but in the whole of history, of everywhere man has gone without God.

As I step back into the doors of the candlelit St. Herman’s for a vespers service on a rainy winter eve, I battle an onslaught of intrusive thoughts, a common one whispering “Oh look, you’ve become religious, who do you think you are, you think this is really the Way?” But this thought fades quickly into the pit of gnashing absurdities, and seeks another victim standing in the nave. And soon the sweet smell of frankincense, the amber glow of the candles, the solemn chants and the gilded icons, the sensorium of Christ fills my senses, and I no longer need to think, rather, I know that I have found the way because it has found me naked, and it has become the one thing needful. Even if I’m only a millimeter onto the path, I know it exists, and I can never un-know that.

The dust from the floor of that temple…

That small wooden church, where we all just stood

Transfigured by proximity

To a mystery, our gaze affixed.

Where we prayed.

Warmed by a blaze uncreated

The dust of that floor, those ashes,

Those specks of eternity

Birthed into Sunday morning.

The dirt we brought in on prodigal feet,

After we fed the pigs,

After we forgot who we are.

The dust that fell from the rafters of our thoughts

And humbled by the presence of the One who contains all thought.

That dust.

Has become all flame in the beams of the eastern light

That dust on the floor, from the ceiling,

From our boots, our pigs, the paths

That dust isn’t dust anymore.

We are no longer who we are,

In the presence of that light.

We are who we are to become.

Oh untouchable boundary fix’d amidst   
A chord of sky and earthen tone 
A motionless string, when pluck’d it rings,
The triumphant light, the birthing dawn. 
 
Oh technicolor rift, birthplace of myth, 
The panoramic womb, 
Those who thread such a narrow gate 
Go honor’d with robes on empyrean thrones. 

Oh first drawn line, the Genesis of time, 
Birthplace of creation, the heavenly mind. 
Source of highest height and depths below 
Drawing us hither to things ineffable 

Timeless stage of day and night
Level’d edifice of eventuality. 
Liminal layer of perceptual symmetry. 
Funeral pyre for the daylight bloom 
Sliver’d gateway of the rising moon. 

Oh steadfast marker for ship and soul 
Standing fix’d, a perfect measure 
Lift our hearts to your wondrous creator
Who awaits our bow with noetic treasure 

(This is the first part in a series of essays exploring the connection between cosmology and psyche. Much of the bones of this essay was written as a graduate-level essay for a masters in Archetypal Psychology. Pardon the wordiness, I’m getting the academia out of the old mind-hose so that more pithy thoughts can hopefully come down the pipe…).

If you’ve been suckered into observing to the headlines of corporate media over the last few years, you’ve undoubtedly seen the ghosts of ancient cosmology knocking at the gates of our cultural psyche. However you wouldn’t trust the treasure of this Trojan horse by the way such thinking is portrayed as “backwards” and “science-denying” or one of my favorites: “counter-factual”.

The rusty gates of reductionism, constructed with brittle post-Enlightenment brass, have a fatal weakness: they cannot handle the gravitas of naked phenomenology: the sobering fact that no matter how many probes we send into space to measure the infinite motions from infinite vantage points, the sun will still rise and set above our heads. For the pious, it’s how God created it for us to experience. For the skeptic, it’s an illusion of our senses.

“In so far as we make use of our healthy senses the human being is the most powerful exact scientific instrument possible the greatest misfortune of modern physics is that it's experiments have as it were been set apart from the human being physics refuses to recognize in nature anything not shown by artificial instruments and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.” - Goethe

I’ve noticed that the intelligentsia of our time, seem awkwardly confused by the rising numbers of flat-earthers. They are unable to admit that these “backwards” thinkers are actually living in a reality that rests solidly beneath the modern pageantry of abstract reasoning. This rise in this ancient worldview actively challenges our epistemological complacency. During the past few years, the radical, yet ancient idea of the Earth as a stationary, flat plane has made a small, yet startling return into the collective consciousness. Videos and articles claiming and demonstrating the Earth to be a level plane have been uploaded en masse to YouTube and other video sites. Popular news sources voraciously criticize the dangers of allowing such “baseless” information to be propagated. Yet they apparently aren’t doing enough. In a 2018 Forbes study, one-third of Americans between the age of 18 and 24 were skeptical that the Earth was a globe. To most humans, the notion of a flat Earth brings about a sneer or an uncomfortable laugh; a common response to a concept that, on the surface, seems entirely out of sync with the progress of modernity. 

This essay is not a claim to absolute material truth between the globe model or the flat model; neither am I on a conspiratorial witch-hunt. I am here to explore the primacy of our first-person awareness and how this perspective, a symbolic perspective, is undeniably central to any meaning we may find in our world.

The rise of skepticism towards modern science and the re-emergence of the embrace of ancient cosmology is a worthy moment to pause for examination of why we believe what we believe. For the establishment of technocratic scientism, the notion that we don’t live on a spinning ball presents a frustratingly backwards argument against the utopian vision of progress. This geocentric idea appears to be a wake up call from our collective psyche to balance a hypertrophied rationalism, to reunite the fractured hemispheres of our brain and return to an embodied symbolic, even religious, worldview. It might be returning us to a world where the words “up” and “down” have universal value, where the human being is a vessel of meaning rather than a sack of flesh and bones.

“…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

…” 
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

When we lose the common ground of objectivity and trust that gives coherent meaning to the world around us we begin to find ourselves in a society bearing the fruits of such relativism. In this ‘flat earth’ moment, we find ourselves in a period of strangeness, where, without the axis mundi connecting the phenomenal and the noumena, the image and the archetype, unconscious forces emerge to trigger us and shake our foundations. “God is dead, and thus everything is permitted”. As information becomes more decentralized, control of the accepted cosmology moves away from established arbiters of perception while the fools on the fringes begin to flip things over, uncovering the prevalent ancient beliefs that have evaded the sterilized scalpel.

These sudden shifts in human paradigms are none other than shifts in the mythical perception of the world around us. From the dawn of civilization, humans have woven frameworks to explain the seasons and the motions of the heavenly bodies. But since the Copernican Revolution and Enlightenment Period, we have experienced a split between the mythic conception of the universe and sensory experience of it.

Loss of myth means loss of orientation in a bewildering time. The rise in technology has turned us away from our surroundings and into our devices which have become our surroundings. While our search bars give us access to every documented myth, we are at a loss of how to incorporate this numinous wisdom into our scattered, contemporary lifestyle. This siren call of digital connectivity has many adrift in a sea of distractions as we seek to fill the void of physical connection with scrolling and status updates. The biological instincts that helped us thrive in nature have been hijacked by sleek interface design and colorful notification bubbles. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything that becomes relative becomes doubtful.

For better or worse, the energy of myth still lives and surrounds us. It can be found in movies, TV shows, and news stories. This is allowed because it have the same orienting effect on our life as it did for our ancestors. “You’ve just got that from the movies”, most will say with a laugh and a wink. However, Science, as a replacement for our superstitions, has pushed humanity towards the edges of the known in equally mythological fashion. Our space missions are named after the Greek pantheon, but these incredible experiments are still only available to a select few. The everyman is not the hero of the scientific stories; rather these roles are filled by astronauts and men behind closed lab doors. In the light of the growing skepticism of our modern scientific cathedrals, we can find a new frame when we replace the word 'theory' with ‘myth’ and view the scientific viewpoint as an archetypal premise alongside all other mythologies. Included in these myths would be The Myth of Evolution, The Myth of the Big Bang and the Myth of Gravity. These are all models, generally accepted as truth, explaining who we are, how we got here, and why we’re being pulled towards the ground. 

The difficulty with the Copernican renovation of the medieval cosmic topography is that it fails to recognize its own projected mythology. The grand narrative of a progressive, scientific world where human happiness is supposedly arrived at by objectivity and mechanical progress but it still relies on our experience of this desired outcome. Scientism fails to consider the inevitable side effects of this modern cosmological perspective on the human psyche and how it plays a part in the alienated senses of modern man. When this cultural shift is viewed through the lens of psychology and phenomenology, we see how the deconstruction and division of man from his environment has led to the inevitable blowback from our divided psyche and the eruption of ancient perspectives. 

In our situation today, not only does there appear to be a breakdown in the trust of authoritative institutions, but the role of the holy fool is fast arising in the online culture of epistemology, bringing into question everything we ‘know’ to be true.  The resurgent energy of provocation, seen in meme culture, is also seen in the rise of those who are questioning, (in jest or not), the shape of the Earth. It is this skepticism, this doubt in authority, that once fueled the Scientific Revolution’s attack on the Church. Now we are seeing the ouroboros of empiricism eat itself and return to devour “Science” itself. We are coming to realize that many of the things we believe about the world are inherited and taken on the same faith that science once aimed to eliminate. 
The status quo image of the world as a globe, however scientifically accurate, is not something that we experience on a daily basis. It’s safe to say that in fact, most of the time, excluding earthquakes and drunken stupor, the Earth feels flat and motionless. It is only when we begin to abstract ourselves from our environment, taking our view further away from the immanence of our immediate surroundings, that we find ourselves viewing the world in our mind as we have been taught and shown in pictures: as an object floating in space, and our minds follow suit. When scientists speak of the ‘global environment,’ they have in mind a world that humans have surrounded. Expelled to its outer surface, we have become ex-habitants, rather than in-habitants.  

We are remembering that the meanings of things are not contained within the mechanical descriptions of them; instead, the meanings are contained within the experience of them, from the inside. Through a symbolic attitude, we can witness how the emergence of ancient tropes in the collective psyche acts as a counter pole to the hyper-certainty of rationalism.

Science, with its reductive mechanisms and bias towards objectivity, has largely ignored these deeper, more rooted dimensions of human experience. In order to return to the garden of meaning, we must be willing to return to the organic sense of seeing and experiencing the Earth as symbolic translators of immediate experience. We must be willing to allow our senses to be correct, with a healthy sense of discernment and observation.

For the early astronomers, the cosmos was conceived as a series of spheres which man did not live on, but inside, residing at the center of the universal experience. Through a series of human epochs, we have gradually removed ourselves from that center. Telescopes and microscopes have projected our consciousness further away from this sacred center, creating a reality that only seems to hold up in equations. With each successive zeitgeist, the enchanted view of reality succumbed to a more rationalistic and calculated view of our place in the universe. Phenomenology and the symbolic attitude, give us the tools to examine the cosmos both within and without as a unified field and brings us into connection with our most profound principles of observation that shape our experience.  

Of the mythological and deep psychic implications raised by the modern-day revival of geocentrism in the crowd of “flat earthers”, the most impactful might be the idea of returning humanity to an inner sense of belonging in the cosmos: a re-enchantment of place. If you pretend, for just a moment, that the Earth actually is flat; then the scriptural accounts of creation, the traditional maps, and the human experience becoming vastly more meaningful as descriptions of both symbolic and felt experience. Sweat lodges, Maypole dances, and Churches become physical crystallizations of a lived cosmology, rather than quaint representations of superstition. Whether our ancestors knew they lived on the outside of a spinning ball or not, they experienced themselves as indwellers inside nested spheres of an environment, sharing the sacred center of a cosmic mystery.

Despite the prevalent hold of modern science, it is fascinating to witness how the original world view, especially the ancient and primary cosmology, is still here, hovering so close to us that is has practically trapped itself between our lived human experience and our scientific theories about the world. From our view, the sun, the moon, and planets still rise in the east, the Earth stands perfectly still, and the sky is stretched like a vault above our heads. Of course, we are told that this experience is a trick, a misconception of the superstitious mind. However, the dissonance is real, especially for those who seek to return to the mythological and symbolic reality. The contemporary emphasis of looking at nature from the outside has blurred the valuable discernment between the literal explanation of phenomena and our inner experience of symbolic meaning.

Just as we have learned to interpret alchemy as representing something quite different from a chapter of historical science, a geocentric cosmology may also be revealed  to us in its truest gestalt, having no defined place in the linear path of human development, rather as anchor of perspective for a psyche inflated by the archetype of scientific authority.  To regain the healthy currents of life and sensory awareness, we need to remember the spark of humanity that gives rise to the perception of things from within the individual, a shared inheritance of perspective. Rather than casting our attention into the abstracted and alienating vision from outside, the Gordian knot of the age asks us to cut through the illusions of Scientific certainty and re-inhabit the soul’s perspective.

“What this word (Earth) means here is far removed from the idea of a mass of matter and from the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back – as, indeed, the very thing that it is- and sheltered. In the things that arise the earth presences as the protecting one.” - Martin Heidegger. Origin of the Work of Art

All mythical journeys end with the return to the home, to the center, the heart that we left in order to venture out face our illusions and remember our true nature. Is it possible that the return of the flat earth perspective is symbolic of this return home to a cosmology centered on human experience? The myths of modern science have cast our imaginations out of the garden. No longer residing at the still heart of a conscious universe we are now hurtling through an infinite and numbing void at incomprehensible speeds. This rupture with the ancestral vision is akin to the rupture with our own unconscious. The repression of this ancient cosmology is like an alienation of the fountainhead, a reversal of instinctual knowing of our place in the cosmos that still submits its sensual experience to the doctrines of scientific institutions.For the collective psyche, starved of its sensual, Earth-bound awareness, the return to a more intimate cosmology may as well be celebrated.

Under the spell of modernity, we fail to realize that a participatory mode of perception will inevitably produce a nuanced approach to the world. As we march off to cities and sift through current events on screens, we are bypassing the opportunity of direct experience with nature’s ways and the opportunity to create symbols based on lived experience and allowing others to create our world for us. In order to embody this symbolism and inhabit the world fully, we must first strip away the outer, artificial garments and stand naked. We must be able to take off the VR goggles of modern science and technology for a moment and try to see the world with the immediacy that depth psychology prescribes.

“For it is the body, the feeling, the instincts which connect us with the soil. If you give up the past you naturally detach from the past; you lose the roots in the soil, your connection with the totem ancestors that dwell in your soil. You turn outward and drift away and try to conquer other lands because you are exiled from your own soil” - Carl Jung

Every attempt at greater consciousness is generally followed by an enantiodromia, a reversal, a switch into the opposite, into unconsciousness. This is the process of contention between opposites by which world-views and cultures tend to evolve. This tension exists both on the individual and cultural level and the friction between these opposing views provides the fuel for consciousness to express itself in new patterns.

In a symbolic world, our reality is understood and translated in a fashion that connects experience and knowledge. We describe occurrences in the way that we experience them, and this allows for universality of stories and myths that can inform our shared subjective reality. The resistance to the heliocentric model appears to be the collective psyche’s attempt to salvage this phenomenological mysticism and return humanity to a center of embedded meaning. It is the natural urge to express the map of the world as we experience it because this expression seeks to inform how human beings live their lives and interact with the image of the cosmos. By projecting ourselves out through our machines and devices into an artificially augmented world, we fall into materiality and remove ourselves from the anthropic center bestowed upon us by God.

  
If we are tricked into thinking that technology provides a perception which is truer and more valid than our lived experience, then we are in danger of being possessed by a principality that can sweep us out of the embodied perspective of our reality and we will loosen from our capacity to fully inhabit the world. Our imagining is all too readily crushed by the high-powered impact of a global science more intent on establishing the authority of its own particular view of the environment, and of what human beings are doing to it, than enhancing our own awareness and powers of observation.

The gap that separates ancient cosmology from modern science is a chasm of meaning begging to crossed by an ontological return to primary experience. On one extreme, we process reality exclusively with a mechanical and materialistic explanation, where everything is devoid of meaning and a higher purpose. On the other extreme, we interpret reality solely through a symbolic language, where facts and events are the vessels of spiritual significance. Neither of these methodologies is complete without its balancing opposite. A purely material perspective learns how reality functions, but perceives no higher reason for its existence, while a purely spiritual perspective understands the mythos of the universe without understanding the groundwork. Ideally, we can adopt both attitudes without sacrificing one to the other. Meaning depends on how we look at things. The least of things with a meaning are always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

If I have given the reader the impression that I am denying the technical achievements of modern science, then I may not have been able to pull them away far away from their objective frame of reference to see my point. Our current technological cosmology is undoubtedly useful for exploring the possibilities of the edge and providing a rational backdrop to how things work. Without the advances in technology we would not experience the connectivity and freedom of expression that we enjoy today. However, technology is reaching a point where it has begun to yank human consciousness away from its traditional moorings inside the wisdom of the world and the language that created it. We are in danger of losing our grounded, symbolic relationship to the world, and falling over the edge into abstraction and disembodiment. Each person holds the sacred job of embodying the center of an mandalic awareness. Of being a witness to their inner and outer experience. When we sacrifice that role to others with secular motives, we sacrifice our personhood, our priesthood, and give up our capacity to be a vehicle of deep meaning.

Might we consider that what is “flat” is actually the reductionistic thinking that has quantified every perception into a chart of data points. It is this screen of thinking that we are now called to see beyond.

“Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for the Western man”- (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963, p. 210).

One of the things I would do with a time machine is expose Carl Jung to the teachings of Christian Orthodoxy. I firmly believe that if Jung, had been exposed to the infinite depth of the eastern tradition, he would have found shining answers to his deepest questions about the soul and the psyche. And to satisfy the wishes of many Christians enticed by his thinking, Jung might have been able to to provide a true map of meaning, leading seekers of spiritual truth towards a personal fullness, and a communion with God.

Because of its history of persecution and marginalization, the Eastern Orthodox Church never passed through the eye of modernity with the same theological clumsiness as the Western churches, which moved to adopt more secular and progressive values in the post-Enlightenment era. This tendency toward rational empiricism and revisionism within the West is, in large part a result of their bending towards the materialism of social pressures and the inability to defend a timeless mystery in the face of worldly flux. This finger-to-the-wind approach has irreparably muddied the waters of our western cosmology, blending the worldview of scientism and religion into a murky vision, a mess of relativism and scientism with pieces of God sprinkled on top. As a result, Western Christianity has lost the ability to embody God’s deep and dappled presence both inside of and above creation.

On the other hand, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which remained mostly separate from the political and ideological changes of the West, remains an essentially pre-modern church, and is now attracting refugees of western materialism who seek a holistic, more archetypal and communal approach to identity and cosmology. These modern pilgrims, sensing a deep schism in modern cosmology, seek out a mystical subjective frame that can simultaneously be shared within an objective community. A vision that approaches each person as the valued piece of a greater body. Jung’s gnosticism didn’t do it, and neither does the watered-down Protestant popularism.

‘Orthodoxy’, which means “right view, or right worship” maintains a clearly vertical, and unwavering orientation towards God. As a student of Jung at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and a recent convert to the Eastern Church, I found that Orthodoxy and Jungian depth psychology dovetail in perpendicular harmony, both pointing, in their own manner, at the north star of an ultimate mystery: God, for the church, and “the self” (or psyche) within depth psychology.

Although Orthodoxy and Jung’s depth psychology do not embrace the exact ends, both paths point towards wholeness within the individual by integrating and resurrecting all substantial aspects of the self. Both paths offer the motion of drawing the ego, our sense of isolated individuality, towards something greater and more profound: an experience of and even a communing with the Person of objective Truth.  In the case of depth psychology, it is the wholeness of the Self, in the case of Orthodox Christianity it is none other than the participation in Christ, theosis, the union with God as whole person, deified by Divine Energy.

Among psychological researchers, Carl Jung stands out for his uncanny ability to speculate on mystical potentials, while remaining rooted in the scientific. Jung was clear that he did not discount the unknown as an element behind the observable. He was adamant that in seeking to understand the observable phenomenon, we must not simply discard that which lies beneath and outside our methods of reflection. Jung confronted the interface between the observable and the transcendent with an open-mindedness and a sense of awe that was rare in the scientists and intellectuals of his time.  He was critical of post-modernism and the collective movement away from the shared symbols of religious tradition and the shallow embrace of relative values. He lamented that man was living in a symbolic vacuum:

“We only live banal, ordinary, rational, or irrational things—which are naturally also within the scope of rationalism, otherwise you could not call them irrational. But we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically?”

More and more humans in our modern age are waking up to the importance of Jung’s insights on the spiritual and religious dimensions of the psyche. Jordan Peterson has captured this moment with his famous lecture series on the Old Testament. And many who were born in the Christianized west have left their original religious moorings in search of worldly ritual and symbols, unaware that the Holy Liturgy of the Orthodox Church still practices a connection to God that has not been diluted and ransacked by the personal interpretations of Protestantism, nor has it been deconstructed by the rusty knife of secularism, or handed over its authority to fallible man like Catholicism.

Jung was careful with his public views on religion and defined it psychologically as a psychic function of images and powers that contain such luminosity and depth, they were naturally worshipped by the individual. By containing religious experience within the psyche, he was free to explore its theological elements without criticism from the scientific community of his time.

The Eastern Orthodox Church on the other hand integrates the entire spectrum, affirming reality on a metaphysical level as the source of true knowledge while also acknowledging that the psyche is able to experience this supreme knowledge through communion and sacramental participation. Although Jung possessed some familiarity with the writings of the early church fathers such as Origen and Augustine, his knowledge of the core of early Christian theology appears to be limited. Jung’s exposure to Christianity was mostly filtered through his difficult relationship to his father, who’s Protestantism felt empty and meaningless to Jung. Despite the glaring Christian Orthodox hole in Jung’s exploration of religious thinking, the parallels between Jung’s mystic view and the conceptual framework of the Orthodox Church are manifold.

The Image of God

Jung’s archetypal God-image can be understood as something akin to the potential wholeness of the self at the center of the psyche. However, the full potential of the Self/God-image is not revealed due to the fact that the, psyche cannot be distinct from God as such: “It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious”. Jung’s ambiguity towards the concept of God can be attributed to his own complex against charges of mysticism from the scientific community of his time. However, his archetypal theory clearly hints at metaphysical and mystical underpinnings of the psyche.

The Christian Orthodox tradition resists inserting a division between human nature, creation, and super nature. In Orthodox Christianity, all of nature contains a profound mystery, which scales up towards the ultimate mystery. Even if fallen, creation and man within it was and still is a mystery in which the symbiosis of the divine presence is frequently and luminously manifested. This was seen, archetypally, in the incarnation of God himself as man. In the Church Fathers we can find a similar emphasis on the two principles of the knowable and observable, yet mysterious, interaction of God within the world and the human psyche. The Church avoids the western fundamentalist attribute of the anthropomorphism of a God stripped of his transcendence or the opposite: a divinity which never incarnates.

Rather, the Eastern tradition emphasizes that God can be known through contrast and paradox in a manner similar to the Jungian “self”. According to St. Dionysios the Aeropagite, God can be understood as that which is and that which is not, “…above all affirmation [and] above all denial.” The Greek theologian St. Gregory Palmas, wrote that the nature of God, who’s energies are known to humans, also remains wholly transcendent and unknowable in His essence, allowing for the usefulness and existence of the divine in the human psyche, while at the same time existing in a completely unknown realm beyond.

This distinction was very familiar to Jung who’s idea of the “God-image” within the psyche acted as an indwelling point of reference towards a larger, paradoxical, unconscious and transcendent mystery. Jung characterizes this unknowability of the unknown through his assertion that the psychological archetypes we perceive are not the things in themselves, but are influenced by their totality in a realm beyond our access. This central point of depth psychology has its mystical counterpart in the the theology of Eastern Christianity. Fr. John Romanides, an Greek Patristic scholar, observed that spiritual images and symbols are not in themselves the content of the reality that there are ushering into human perception. They reach up towards a true archetype which is unknowable through human cognition.  In other words, the images are in the realm of spiritual energies, but they are not conjunct with the knowable essence that is their source. In becoming “God” a person does not appropriate the transcendent mystery of God, but instead fulfills their human potential through theosis, or the union of the person with the divine energies, the logoi.

In Orthodoxy, logoi are the places of interface between God and creation. It is important to note that the logoi do not form an autonomous realm between God and the creatures. Rather, they are aspects of God himself, divine energies, active in the world. With this in mind, we can make a parallel between logoi and archetypes. Archetypes and the experience of archetypal images, for Jung, are the constellations of the psyche that create the spokes of our psychic wheel. Jung elucidates a poetic theory that the archetypes are like timeless riverbeds, consisting of images and emotions, that reach out into the fibers of our personal and collective experience. Yet, in the final analysis, Jung was never certain just what the archetype was: “Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can finally be explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language”.

The archetype is an unchanging universal form that interacts with each individual life to bring forth unique content. According to Jung, the encounter of certain archetypes establishes a psychological process that shapes the narrative development of the psyche for each individual. These relate to a shared mythology contained within the depths of the collective unconscious which is accessible through the dreams and symbolic spontaneity of the personal experience. On the other hand, Orthodoxy, through the writings of St. Maximos, leads the individual towards the encounter with God through the radiant logoi of God, each pointing towards the personality of the central archetype of Christ.

Both the Christian East and Jung’s depth psychology approach the individuation process, and the coming into the image of God from a similar vantage point. Jung, who was primarily exposed to Western Christian anthropology, was not aware of the mystical deification process that existed within Eastern Orthodoxy, which emphasized the polishing of the mirror and defragmentation of the psyche in order to reflect the purest image of God. Jung states in Aion that “it is only through the integration of these unconscious images that a man becomes a psychic whole…the merely conscious man who is all Ego is a mere fragment”.

Salvation in the Eastern Christian tradition is not so much a courtroom atonement, (as it is often misconstrued). It is a process of spiritual individuation embodied by the return to a mysterious center. “Sin” is viewed as a distortion of that which is good, and the process of salvation is a return to wholeness, a polishing of the mirror so that one can reflect God’s energies through their unique incarnation. Orthodoxy focuses on renewal and purification of the individual, turning them away from their egoic distortions and towards a loving God.

St. Gregory Palamas spoke of the essences and energies of God from which we can learn to understand the nature of God. Similar to Jung, he is careful to point out that the ultimate nature is truly mysterious and unknowable but that we can see his energies at work in all of creation and within ourselves. Jung held a similar view that we are each given the opportunity to view the absolute through the clarity of our personal virtues.

“God, therefore, is unchangeable, and is called one for the reason that he changes not. Thus also the true imitator of God, who is made after God’s image, is called one and the selfsame when he comes to perfection… when he is fixed on the summit of virtue, is not changed, but remains always one. For every man, whiles he is in wickedness, is divided among many things and torn in many directions” - Carl Jung

The idea that man bears a God-image that should be integrated into the inner self, the central archetype correlates to the Orthodox view of our spiritual task towards not just God-image, but God-likeness. While Jung focused primarily on the psychological and cultural symbolism of the archetypes, a horizontal perspective; the Orthodox teachings consider this development in a vertical manner, taking the image of God and moving it towards a perfected ontology, moving us away from sin and towards a purified, defragmented, state of being. Jung’s primary religious focus is on the reconciling of images in the God-image while Orthodoxy focuses on both images and behavior, using the logoi, the emanations of God present in man to develop a likeness of God. “The many animals are affective states to which man is prone. The individuation process, subordinates the many to the One. But the One is God, and that which corresponds to him in us is the imago Dei, the God-image”. Had Jung encountered Orthodox teachings, especially the works of St. Maximos the Confessor, which are rich in emphasis on knowledge and experience, it might have been enough for him to adjust his skeptical viewpoint of Christianity.

Individuation and Christ

Jung’s subjective approach to religion allows the religious function of the psyche to apply the Christian narrative more vividly and directly to one’s own experience. Edward Edinger, who explored this perspective in Ego And Archetype, considered the crucifixion to be a central defining image for western culture, as the culmunation of Christ’s individuation: where Jesus as the ego and Christ as Self merge. Nested within this psychological understanding of Christianity are the Jungian equivalents of the confrontation with the unconscious, rebirth, and the individuated personality.

For Jung, individuation is the journey that a person embarks on to become a complete individual, a psychic unity. Von Franz describes this process as a “subjective experience that conveys the feeling that some supra-personal force is actively interfering in a creative way. One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design”. Individuation, according to Orthodoxy as theosis where the inherited image of God, the imago dei is transformed into the “likeness” and qualities of God in both the mental and metaphysical dimension. Theosis can only be achieved through integration of the separate parts of the human. And in Orthodox Tradition this can only be achieved through Christ who was sent by God to assume and redeem all of human nature. Orthodox churchgoers do not say that they “accept” Christ as their savior, rather they affirm that they are united to Christ, who, in turn, unites them.  

 Jung’s anthropocentric archetype of Christ is matched by the Orthodox theocentric reality of Christ, drawing its self-understanding from scripture, iconography, and tradition. The hypothesis of Orthodoxy is that our human nature has been assumed by the incarnation of Christ, and is being healed through our humble admission of fragmentation. Jung compared this sense of centrality to the surrender of our self-navigation to something greater: “It is, in a sense, the feeling that we have been ‘replaced’ but without the connotation of having been ‘deposed’. It is as if the guidance of life had passed over to an invisible center”

That the ontological fibers of the person are transformed and healed through the self-sacrifice of Christ’s incarnation are core tenets of Orthodox theology. “The creative Logos himself came into history as Incarnate Lord, to reconfigure the inner structure of humanity’s being”. Christ, the singular Logos, as the substrate of Being, brings integration in a way that the entire creation can conceive the one Creator, who consists of many logoi. We may imagine this process as similar to the ancient Japanese practice of kintsugi where broken pottery is put back together using gold glue. This is the central idea of St. Maximus the Confessor, whose logoi are God’s “thoughts-as-vocations” and foundations of reality, even before reality was manifested. All of these logoi point towards and unite in the wholeness of God, through Christ, the Logos, who is singular and many simultaneously. While both Christian Orthodoxy and depth psychology point towards a center, a Christic image, who crucifies and unifies the irreconcilable opposites, Orthodoxy’s Christ exists as a compass point of holiness, a reality both within and beyond humanity, while Jung’s Christ-as-self epitomizes a psychological wholeness, to be experienced through the merging of opposites. However, in both Christianity and depth psychology, the function of the eros, or desire, plays a paramount role in the acquisition of this centrality.

Eros, the missing link

In the secular world, there is a common misconception of the Christian God as completely transcendent and unreachable in our human, everyday experience. However, Orthodoxy emphasizes our ability to experience and perceive God’s omnipresence as a critical pathway towards true knowledge and union with God and thus the healing of the soul. There is no arbitrary ontological split within the individual between the natural and the spiritual. Orthodox theology embraces experience as a locus of transformation, rather than simply intellectual knowledge or conceptual belief. As I mentioned in the beginning, there is no place in Orthodoxy for a “schizoid” faith, one which leaves the body and instincts separate from a dissociated mind. 

For Orthodoxy, eros, the erotic principle of God is the means by which the divine communes with humanity. This is the relational nature of God that draws our desire for wholeness towards itself, bringing us first into a horizontal unity and then attracting our spirit upwards on the vertical axis towards God. God acts as the quintesential Other who offers himself in an ecstatic self-offering. This is fully embodied through the life, death, ressurection of Christ who assumed and ressurected our fallen human nature. In the Orthodox theological vision, God is not defined in our relationship to him, which can be strengthened or weakend based on our efforts. God, as a personal energy is in relationship to us. The core teaching of the Gospel is that we do not get to God solely through our own work, rather God comes to us, leaving us with the question of our response. Do we accept God’s love or not?

One of Jung’s biggest criticisms of Christianity in the modern world was its apparent denial of the feminine and material nature: “But once Mother Church and her motherly Eros fall into abeyance, the individual is at the mercy of any passing collectivism and the attendant mass psyche”. He claimed that the Trinitarian model of wholeness and the Christ-image was missing a fourth branch representing the material and chthonic nature of man. Instead, this image was truncated by the church into the Anti-Christ who carried the negative, sinful shadow of Christ.  For Jung, Christ as the “perfect man”, does not necessarily embody the “complete” man and thus embodies a psychic unattainability. Combined with the Cartesian split between mind and body, and the secularism of the Protestant reformation, this image of Christ was placed outside of human experience and in a realm beyond, utterly inaccessible to the average man. However, Orthodoxy, which has maintained a clear connection to the original texts of Christianity, emphasizes Christ’s intermingled divine and human nature. His assumption of our nature while remaining God, opens the door for our nature to be deified by God.

“God became man so that man might become God” -St. Athanasius

Rather than denial of the bodily passions, life in Christ assumes and transfigures these passions, reorienting them away from transitory pleasures and towards God.

Jung accurately interprets the sterility of modern Christianity as an unhealthy movement away from the instincts.  “Legitimate faith must always rest on experience” (Jung, 1911, par. 345). Jung’s concern against “faith” seems not to be against the belief in the numinous, rather in the faith of habit that creates stagnation and cultural regression. He seems to particularly single out the Christian church and its modern malady of being drained of the personal experience of a loving God. The concept of eros is a crucial link between our framented nature and the God-image, the wholeness that is sought in depth psychology. St. Maximus proclaims: “Without the power of desire, there is no longing, and so no love”. In both Orthodoxy and depth psychology, eros, the drive towards relatedness is the catalyst that brings us closer to God, closer to wholeness. In the Eastern Orthodoxy, God is known and paricipated with through his uncreated energies beyond the reach of the intellect. “God is known only through personal disclosure, as a triadic communion, an ecstatic self-offering of erotic goodness” (Yannaras, 1997, p.64).

For Eastern Orthodoxy, ontology precedes morality. In other words, being precedes the manner of being. Virtue arises out of this being and not being out of virtue. The most fundamental form of being, according to Orthodoxy is the Being of God which reaches out towards communion with individuals. 

“The Holy Spirit is not absent from any created being…for being God and God’s spirit, He embraces in unity the spiritual knowledge of created things, providentially permeating all things with His power, and vivifying their inner essences in accordance with their nature” - St Maximus the Confessor

The idea of a God who exists “up there” while we are “down here” is alien to Orthodox thinking. In Orthodox doctrine there is no being without God, so we cannot fall into the trap of a spirituality divorced from the body and its desires as is a common misconception of Western Christianity. The body matters; the material world matters. And without these elements, there is no altar, no temple with which we can turn towards the center.

Conclusion

In making these comparisons between the cosmology of Jung and the Eastern fathers of Christianity I am not intending to show that they are the same exact path. Instead I want to demonstrate that both of these paths acknowledge a similar type of journey. This is a journey of the soul from fragmentation and darkness into illuminated wholeness. There is a universality of experience expressed in both categories. Both God and the collective unconscious are forever beyond this human experience, but they are still reachable through their energies, logoi, and archeyptal images. In both Eastern Christianity and Jungian psychology there is a guidance away from ego-identification with the central Archetype, with the God; and our sense of humility and admission of sin protects us from the great fall that comes from pride and identification with the ego.

The journey of healing in both depth psychology and Eastern Orthodoxy requires the admission that we are fragmented and we must first be willing to see ourselves, as we are, in our disordered state in order to become united to our original self once again. St Athanasius offered that we are like “silver mirrors created to reflect the light of God, to perceive God inwardly”. Yet many of us have lost consciousness of this divine interior image and have turned towards depth psychology and religion to begin the clarifying process. We are reminded through both paths, that the pearl of our being is never destroyed, it has simply lost it’s luster. Both the Christian Orthodox theosis and the Jungian “self” require a willful sacrifice of our distorted ego so that we may be restored to our original divine image. Both emphasize a symbolic participation: Orthodoxy, through partaking in the liturgical sacraments and the logoi; and in depth psychology, through the archeytpal encounters with the unconscious images. In both, the transcendant can become known through the spiritual and physical senses.

In conclusion, Orthodox theology and Jungian depth psychology can be mapped and patterned as a cross: Jung’s mandalic vision accompanies our journey on the horizonal plane, unifying our experiences into an image of the innermost self, while Christian Orthodoxy takes this idea of the “self” and proposes a vertical reality where the energies of our human nature are assumed and assembled into the perfection of the logos or Christ, so that we may become perfected through surrender to the source of being. Depth psychology leads to wholeness of the individual, and Orthodoxy takes this wholeness and brings it into holiness, through surrender to God.