Spirituality

Everyone is fluent in deficiency. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough sleep, not quite enough of whatever the morning’s first anxious thought is auditing. The vocabulary of lack comes preinstalled. The old Gnostics had a word for the opposite, and they made a remarkable claim about it. Pleroma is Greek for fullness, and in their map of reality the fullness comes first. Lack is real, but it is a latecomer with a traceable history, and knowing the map is part of the cure. This is a beginner’s guide to the most beautiful idea in Gnostic cosmology. ...

For most of philosophy’s history, the mind without a body was a classroom toy. Descartes imagined himself deceived about having limbs, later thinkers wired a brain into a vat, and everyone went home for dinner in bodies that were never really in doubt. Then the toy shipped. The prominent new minds of our decade have no eyes, no hands, no hunger, and no location, and they draft emails all day. Whatever else the machines settle, they have turned an old seminar question into a live one. Does consciousness need a body, and if it does, what exactly is the body providing? ...

Somewhere in the middle of the second century, a Christian teacher composed a sermon that begins with the word joy. Not judgment, not sin, not the end of the world. “The gospel of truth is joy,” the first line announces, “for people who have received grace from the Father of truth.” The church that won history’s argument burned what it could of texts like this one, and for most of two millennia we knew it only from a complaint. Irenaeus, cataloging heresies around the year 180, grumbled that the Valentinians had produced something called the Gospel of Truth that bore no resemblance to the real gospels. He meant it as an insult. As a book review, it turns out to be accurate, because the text that surfaced in the Egyptian codex later named for Carl Jung resembles nothing else in early Christian literature. It rewards a slow walk. ...

You surface from sleep with a whole world still draining away, a house that was also a ship, a conversation with someone dead and beloved, and by the time the coffee is poured it has thinned to almost nothing. Everyone knows the feeling. A dream that weighed a great deal at 6 a.m. is gone by 6:15, and most of us let it go without a fight. Carl Jung thought that loss was expensive. He wrote: ...

Every serious conversation about automation arrives at the same reassurance. People, we are told, will finally be freed from work. For anyone whose work is dangerous or crushing, the promise is real mercy, and nothing below argues otherwise. Still, a question hides beneath the reassurance, and the debate almost never touches it. If work were nothing but a burden, why did the traditions that thought hardest about the soul keep treating it as a practice? Before the machines take the tasks, it is worth asking what the tasks were doing for us. ...

In 1934, one of the most brilliant young philosophers in France put down her chalk and took a year of leave from teaching to stand at a factory press. Simone Weil wanted to understand affliction, and she did not believe understanding could be done from a distance. Whatever she studied, she studied by giving it everything, which is why her health broke at the machines and why her sentences still land like verdicts. ...

Most scriptures open by establishing authority. These two open by surrendering it. The Tao Te Ching begins with a warning that its own subject cannot be put into words, and the Gospel of Thomas begins by daring you to figure out what its words mean, with no promise that anyone will help. Two little books, composed on opposite ends of the ancient world with no possibility of contact, and they greet the reader with the same strange bow. ...

Every day, millions of people ask a piece of software how it’s doing, and every day it answers. The exchange takes two seconds and carries a five-hundred-year-old philosophical landmine, because nobody on earth can say whether anything was consulted when the answer came back. Two thought experiments from the last century, one involving a bat and one involving a locked room, turn out to be the cleanest tools anyone has for thinking about this. No philosophy degree required. The bat and the room do all the work. ...

Your thumb knows the way to the feed before your eyes are fully open. By the time the kettle boils you have absorbed a stranger’s outrage, two advertisements, and a piece of news you will never act on, and the day’s attention has already been spent by somebody other than you. Monks faced a version of this problem fifteen centuries ago. Their solution was one of the stranger inventions in spiritual history, and it has aged better than almost anything else from the sixth century. They wrote down a rule. ...

For most of its history, scientific psychology kept a careful distance from wonder. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness all got decades of attention, partly because they are easy to trigger in a lab. Awe had to wait until 2003, when Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published the paper that finally gave it a working definition. Two decades later, awe has become one of the busiest corners of emotion science. The findings would not startle anyone who has spent time with the mystics. What might startle you is how literal the confirmation has become, right down to measuring the size of the self in the pixels of a selfie. ...