AUTHOR’S NOTE: Not long ago my wife of 46 years told me “You could be a hermit,” an observation with which I concur because I live mostly in my head. She’s still here so I guess she has made her peace with it.

Although I’m devoutly non-religious (my favorite oxymoron), I’m constantly pondering spiritual matters so I’ve never felt the urge to engage in the thought-purging mode of reflection practiced by Eastern mystics (except as an effective remedy for insomnia) nor in the “discursive” style of self-interrogation that focuses on a single idea, essentially an internal dialogue that has been attributed to followers of the Western Mystery Tradition by author John Michael Greer. While meditation is esteemed as a useful form of self-awareness training that promotes mental and emotional well-being, I’m in an almost perpetual state of meditative contemplation without bowing to the rigors of formal discipline.

This theme tends to play in the background as I go about my day and rises to the surface whenever I consider writing a new essay for this blog. Long exposure to the principles of occult metaphysics, both philosophical and psychological, has conditioned me to remain alert for such opportunities, and reading books on the arcane topics that interest me has kept my instinct for suitable material finely-honed. As of August, 2025, this routine will have been in place for eight years, and at the moment it shows no sign of abating.

My take on the spiritual realm is generally aligned with that of the Hermetic Qabalists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, although I part ways with them on the subject of deity. The idea that the abstract pinnacle of Divine wisdom harbors the curious desire to maintain a love/hate relationship with each and every one of us fails to pass the “giggle test” for me. Lon Milo DuQuette has puckishly named this lofty being “the great What-It-Is,” which I interpret to mean it “is what it is” and we are in no position to place conditions and qualifiers on its assumed existence even if we did grant it a humanoid form so we could feel connected.

I can live with the premise of Spinoza that there is an immanent and impersonal potency investing all things as an expression of Cosmic Consciousness. I can also accommodate the opinion of the Deists that a Divine Personage created the Universe and then walked away from it, leaving the abandoned creation to unwind (or unravel) at its own pace with humanity going along for the ride. What I can’t abide is the notion of a prayer-fed “hotline” to the ear of an anthropomorphic God; whoever came up with that one had an overactive imagination (although there is always Pascal’s Wager lurking in the theological weeds, waiting to pounce on the irreligious).

This presumed deity is one that we can’t see, hear or touch (at least not in a rational state of mind free of hallucination), one that we can’t taste (particularly since I’m convinced that the priests imbibe the “good stuff” and the congregation gets the watered-down swill for their surrogate “blood”), and one that we can’t smell (unless flatulence in church is considered to be “of God” and therefore holy, but I would argue that frankincense wafting from a censer doesn’t smell any better). I’m not a Catholic but I’ve been exposed to enough of their pious and pompous rigamarole (replete with “ritual cannibalism” as a sublimated form of the primitive shamanistic practice) to recognize spiritual bankruptcy when I see it.

Since the testimony of the five senses fails us in the comprehension of inscrutable perfection, we are left with the assurances of those who don’t know any more than we do about what is really going on in the Universe. But they will shamelessly make stuff up and than fake its provenance! Religion has the earmarks of a Ponzi scheme in which those who get in on the ground floor are committed to luring other sheep into the fold, and in this day and age I doubt that there are many professional clergymen who have taken a vow of poverty when prescribed dogma of the “snake-oil” variety sells so well and has supplanted the individual quest for sacred meaning. (“Fool’s Journey,” anyone?)

When I lived in the woods of southwestern New Hampshire, I entered my private sanctuary every time I stepped out my back door, and nothing in the years that followed has impressed me as being nearly as legitimate in the way of spiritual veneration because no human artifice stood between the worshiper and the shrine. The only experience to rival it was my visit to the Gothic cathedral in Heidelberg, Germany with a Christian friend on Christmas Eve in 1970, but it was the grandeur of the architecture and not the religious service that moved me. Thoreau’s self-imposed solitude at Walden Pond was an experiment, but mine is lodged in my head and heart and needs no external endorsement or validation.

Postscript: I should add that I have few problems with Judaeo-Christian values, although I find some of the moralizing a bit weak-kneed; I’m more inclined toward the exhortation of the old fire-and-brimstone preacher to “chastise them according to their desserts.” That said, I have no use whatsoever for priesthoods and I haven’t been inside a church since 1970 except for weddings and funerals. I did attend one baptism, but it was performed by a friend in a mountain stream in western Connecticut. The startled infant had a profound moment of silence after being dunked in the icy water.