Counterfeit Mysticism

The collective underdeveloped palettes of us, the cave dwellers

You are what you eat – that’s what I heard, at least, growing up.

And if I wanted to grow up big and strong, like my heroes, well, that meant I needed to eat my broccoli and my cauliflower and my brussel sprouts.

And it’s hard to imagine that underneath his cowl and cape, below the muscle and square jaw, the Dark Knight was mostly Dark Leafy Veg - but hey, if it meant my own biceps would ripple, if it meant grappling hooks and bat-vehicles, if it meant Catwoman, well, you could count 4 year old Josh in.

And maybe it paid off.

I don’t spend my nights peering down on seedy cities, perched atop gargoyles; my car is less billionaire philanthropist, and more suburban mom of three, and as for the muscles and square jaw - well, maybe one day.

But the stuff that makes those greens so good, the vitamins and the minerals, I mean, those things do, truly, form us.

They shape who we become.

I am, mostly, what I eat.

I’m some flesh and blood culmination of eggs and steaks, of onions and garlic and lentils and chicken wings and of course, my brussel sprouts. All of the things that make this body go come from the food I eat.

And they say, the doctors, that our bodies adapt to what we eat.

That all the stuff in our guts, the bacteria and the microorganisms, that which makes up our “micro-biome” - it develops a taste.

I read some articles and they said that when we eat our chips and our tacos and our skittles, our microbiomes eat too.

And those little living things that feed on sugars, they flourish in all our snacking. And when they get hungry, when they want to grow big and strong, well - that’s where our cravings come from.

And if you want to get healthy, shed a few pounds, cut back on the sweeties, they say, the doctors, that you have to starve those critters to death.

A war of attrition.

Me vs a trillion sweet-tooths.

And all I want is a donut.

I remember watching this video, around the same time, about how flavours were developed. Like how you could eat a raspberry or a banana and then, when that wasn’t sweet enough, when you wanted more rasp for your berry, more bang from your banana, you could distill it down.

You couldn’t, neither could I - but the scientists could.

They figure out whatever the chemical composition of flavour is, and they make these extractions.

1000 raspberries of flavour in a single skittle.

And these scientists, mad, I think - they can keep doing this.

Adding, mixing, emulsifying; further and further distilling everything that is natural into some godless creation:

Mountain Dew: Code Red.

And if, by some freak accident, someone slipped you a real raspberry, the ones that grow on bushes planted in the dirt, the ones that need to be picked, and if you ate it - it wouldn’t even register.

It would taste like sand.

We are what we eat.

And we have developed a taste for the monstrous.

It’s the same for mysticism, too.

Don’t get weirded out by the word - I know it has been hijacked by west coast weirdos.

A mystical experience is a transcendent experience - like being overwhelmed at the majesty of a waterfall, like feeling butterflies in your stomach, like drinking Mountain Dew: Code Red.

These experiences transcend our natural ability to process; our human way of understanding. Words and thoughts fall short.

In Christianity, the only place where mysticism makes any real sense, these experiences are rooted in a participation in the Triune God. A partaking of the Divine Life. It is some kind of direct enjoyment of who God is, and it leads to a deeper union and fellowship with Him

But we are what we eat.

And I fear, in these, our modern times, the diets of our souls are synthetic, artificial, grown in a lab. Counterfeits. More like Swedish Berries and less like anything we would find in the wild or grow in a garden. Ingesting Frankenstein’s monster.

And we long for the transcendent - in the deepest ways imaginable, an inconsolable longing for something we cannot even begin to express.

And guess what, the marketers and the advertisers, the salesmen, those who peddle counterfeit mysticism, those who push a fabricated transcendence, they know it - and they hire mad scientists and hippie gurus to concoct some sort of commodity to save our souls.

Some forgery: some phoney encounter, devoid of any real nutritional value - but man does it go down easy.

And I’m not talking about those big counterfeits, the mysticism of the cultic stones or druid flames, the ancient skulls and circles, the esoteric etchings. I’m not talking about alchemy or ritual or LSD trips - these are, quite obviously, a swing and a miss.

I’m talking about all the other things we have developed an appetite for - the things we let grow in us, by the trillion, because we have cultivated a palette for them.

I’m talking about the doomscrolls and the tiny, addicting little dopamine hit of seventy five reels in a row. I’m talking about porn and developing a penchant for disembodied selfishness and pleasure. I’m talking about the glass of whiskey that goes down fast enough to numb the pain, and of course, the donuts and mountain dew that ease the burden of a hard week.

Every counterfeit mystical experience feels good. I think that’s what Solomon was talking about when he’s warning his son:

For the lips of the forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword.

Counterfeits always go down easy, but they are poison.

Sometimes, they’re active poison - infecting us and killing us almost immediately.

Sometimes, however, they’re passive - we starve because we are malnourished, eating the sugar slop of soylent, and our souls fatten and atrophy. We feast on all the wrong things, and we no longer have an appetite for the Good.

That is why prayer and fasting and bible reading, why poetry and paintings, why essays and symphonies, are so hard. We’ve been fed a diet of counterfeit goods, of immediate gratification, of lust indulged.

We have starved ourselves.

And if we ever want to get back to something True, something Good, something Beautiful, some transcendent experience of our Christ, well - you know what you have to do.

You have to starve those little critters to death,

A war of attrition.

Kill everything that has an appetite for the fake, for the simulated, for the counterfeit. And they do not go down easy.

You need to fast so that you can feast.

We need to fast from the immediate and the synthetic, from the counterfeit and the commodified, so that we can say yes to something Real.

So that we can enjoy Ambrosia, the Food of the Gods, the Mystical Feast of God’s Beauty.

We need to cultivate a taste for that which is lovely, Ingesting the Eternity, to become some flesh and blood culmination of the Bread of Life. An Incarnation, as it were.

We are what we eat, and when we dine on Beauty, we are led into Goodness, Truth, and Fullness.

Poems are fruit. Paintings are wine. Essays are breads.

These are Gateways into the Source, our Christ, who is the Bread of Heaven, the fulfillment of all our Spiritual Hunger.

You are what you eat.