Go touch grass, go touch the Divine.

The difficult work of connecting our ambient culture with the cosmic must be done.

It’s occurred to me lately that social media is what would happen if you created a gigantic online university and didn’t staff it with any professors.

If you were to judge by the attitudes of the people on social media alone, though, you wouldn’t think that there aren’t any professors. Judging by attitudes alone, you might suppose that a sizable fraction of people on social media were professors.

It seems to me there was a time, including within my lifetime, when the idea of authority was more remote than it is today. I think about the ‘80s, or earlier. You might have known someone — an aunt or an uncle, or friend’s father or mother — or if you were fortunate, your father or mother — whose job had them at any sort of cutting edge of human knowledge. But few people considered themselves to be very deep authorities about anything, and few people expected anyone to be. If anything, most folks might consider themselves to be the steward of one or two arcane facts — a fun little privilege. There was much, much less detailed debate.

If there’s been a shift from the time when people did not expect to have a whole lot of real authority to a time when many people credit themselves with a greater amount of authority, I imagine that it has occurred partly because there’s an expanding class of people whose daily work is more technical than before.

Also, it obviously has to do with the fact that there’s a lot more general access to information today. I find it funny, and endearing, and a little sad to imagine that over the past few decades we have in vast numbers forced ourselves into rigorous regimens of self-education simply out of our desperate urge to defeat our opponents in various internet debates — but I’m not sure it’s that far off from the truth. We had the internet tossed into our midst, and I think maybe to no small extent we did use it to educate ourselves through fighting.

Part of the reason that people more often speak with authority, then, is just that it’s more often the case that due to increased access they more often have some amount of genuine authority. Significantly, though, it also seems that as people have has greater access to information, it’s created an enormous back-eddy in the long journey to true wisdom — an environment, a mindset, in which people believe that a) it’s imminently possible to be powerful, independent, self-created agents of wisdom, and b) it’s imminently possible to do this out of the contemporary ideas that are relatively easily accessed through relatively incidental experience in day-to-day life, and a media diet consisting largely of what’s close at hand. (I am not sure that I’m entirely immune to this, myself.)

I think you could say, for instance, just as one example, that there is a growing tendency for Americans to solve major problems not through wisdom, but through Americanism — the iteration and re-iteration of our own cultural tropes. And that Americanism actually gets visibly sillier and more grotesque in the process.

In bubbles seen and unseen, the culture at large seems to be significantly separating from real intellectual authority. And more importantly, I think it’s generally the case that both the culture at large and its intellectual corps are separating from any richer cosmic authority — i.e., from full, fulfilling stories about all of existence as a whole. It’s as though the nearness of a more superficial kind of knowing has led us away from fundamentally deeper assertions of truth, and deeper forms of knowing.

It’s unlikely that there has ever been such a pervasive culture that has so completely separated the daily from the sacred. There’s reason to suppose that much of the ancient world made no distinction whatsoever between the political and the spiritual for instance, but that solving human problems was continually related in cosmic, archetypal terms. The civilizations that have followed have overwhelmingly tended to proceed from the assumption of a basic unity of sacred and ordinary, and have furthered it in their own way. Until now.

But there are cosmic, existential ideas that, if thoughtfully explored, greatly expand our personal and collective lives — particularly if we encounter them through the intercession of wise intermediaries.

• Suppose the Earth is actually the site of a tension between existential forces of light and existential forces of darkness. How do we navigate?
  

• Suppose the substrate of our universe is consciousness. What then?
  

• Suppose we are called to forsake idolatry or to cultivate something like detachment — if not to categorically renounce all of our desires then to engage them in a way that they do not use us. What are the healthiest, most complete ways to master ourselves?
  

• Suppose surpassing peace actually comes when we abide something that could be called the Law, the Tao, the will of God. How can we seek that and live by it?
  

• Suppose we are responsible for being stewards of our situation here on Earth. For caring for the poor and the outcast, for loving others, for protecting Earth’s living systems. Clearly, we have a lot further to go. What can we do?

We see what happens when we go without a larger cosmic exploration of life, forsaking the authorities who have already made they journey: It matters. The story of progress becomes childish. The moral sense becomes stunted and intermittent. The individual’s sense of potential is limited, too, and the pursuit of personal growth becomes increasingly characterized by a loud, joyless, and sometimes just-plain-stupid willfulness.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that anyone who gets started with the big questions discovers that, while the inquiry doesn’t necessarily yield easy answers all the time, sources that can profoundly help you along the way are actually not all that hard to find. There are thousands of pages of scripture; of archetypal, epic story; and of the witness of numerous mystics and sages. There are contemporary efforts to put more ancient ideas into living practice, and to revise and enliven them to make them relevant today. And in today’s world, it’s all fairly nearby.

The real challenge, I think, is that once one seeks out spiritual authorities, a gap between the day-to-day life and the exploration of the profound begins to emerge, and it can feel immense, and painful to bridge. It’s not always easy to just whip open the Upanishads, or the Bible, or the writings of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, for instance, and to find something speaking into our vernacular of everyday experience. For many people, to try to live in the world as it is and to entertain the ideas of more thoughtful, more cosmic approach to reality is to feel uncomfortably stretched. It’s an experience of being on a cross.

The tension between the everyday and the profound appears to be at least as old as complex urban societies. We can hear people taking about it even thousands of years ago — often enough leaving “the world” entirely to follow hard after some higher call. It’s an ancient problem, but I think it’s important to notice that the way we are living with the ancient problem may be highly unusual.

That there is such a great gulf to bridge between the daily and the profound for us today should maybe be taken as more of a sign of the dire stakes of the situation that we’re in, rather than it is an indication that it’s okay to passively follow the status quo, because anything else is so hard.

I continue to think about these topics most immediately in Judeo-Christian terms, consistent with the exploration I’ve been doing the past few years (and underwritten by a fundamental personal conversion). I don’t think the Judeo-Christian approach is necessarily the only good way to do it. But growing up, I heard stories from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament about God speaking very directly in people’s lives. These stories were comforting to me in a way, but they also made me feel deprived and alienated. To have God actually speak to you seemed to me to be a tremendous privilege, bestowed only upon the most righteous or the most fortunate. The rest of us were obliged to abide a cold, uncertain silence.

It’s only recently that I’ve returned to these stories and that I hear something new in them. Now it seems to me that fundamental point of stories of God speaking to select people should not be that we are called to bootstrap ourselves in order to make God more accessible to us. Now I think fundamental point of stories of God speaking to select people is to understand how urgently God wants to speak to everyone.

Perhaps living, intelligent, authoritative magic has not died out of the world, but it is hiding behind the things that we have built up in front of it. Indeed, perhaps it wants us more than we want it sometimes. We feel that Divine authority has stopped speaking. But look at the world we have built, its mores and habits. Are we on the call with the Divine, ourselves?

I believe a Divine authority has not stopped speaking.

I believe a Divine authority is still speaking.