Spiritual Substitution

Feeling small compared to the cosmos is not an illness, but rather a sign of higher health, the strong soul’s humility. Seeking smaller surroundings to insulate oneself against that feeling of cosmic smallness is an illness. The need to feel “big enough” for one’s environment at all costs indicates a fundamental fear of the beautiful, the rare, and the great, which is to say a fear of life.

A society or age that succumbed to such an excessive fear of cosmic smallness, and thus fell ill with the need for the insulating comfort of smaller, less humbling surroundings, would look — like us.

If you have never seen a good man, bad men start to look fascinating and admirable to you. If you have never opened your eyes to the beautiful, ugliness eventually becomes increasingly attractive to you. If you have never struggled with the world-altering realization of an overwhelming truth, your mind begins to make performative “commitments” to beliefs or behaviors that you willingly grant are not true. These spiritual perversions, born of a soul lacking deep experience of the true, the good, and the beautiful, actually prove our innate desire for the true, the good, and the beautiful. When denied its proper goals, the soul secretly seeks substitutes.