The first challenge to the religious life is objective reification, which peoples the spiritual world with beings with supernatural properties.

The second challenge to the religious life is subjective deification, which replaces the false scales fallen from the initiate’s eyes with new true ones.

The third challenge to the religious life is apophatic nihilism, which confuses nihilitude for infinitude, and produces radical relativism. “What truth is there beyond subject? Nothing! The transcendent truth is revealed to be nothingness: divine void.”

The fourth challenge to the religious life is whatever I’m obliviously blundering into to right now.

False humility of disingenuous doubt, perhaps.

Fact is, I do know something to which I was oblivious before. Yes, but isn’t that how it always is?

Yes, but this is known in a different mode of knowing. Yes, but when has insight happened any other way? How can you know you haven’t just upgraded scales?

But this time is radically different from the other times.

Yes, but come on. Do I really have to say it? Every time is different; and that, precisely, is what makes it exactly the same. But from the center of the universe, where you sit, this center is unlike the others, ‘coz it knows about the hazards of knowing — ignorance, blindness, self-delusion, institutional bigotry and, of course, bias. Have you been popping pills of color, Awoken One? Just Say No. You’re no better than DEIfiers of the reigning ideological subject (who this time is finally undeluded about its own objective goodness), or gullible consumers of intel on how gullible consumers of fake intel are being fed fake intel. Don’t make me beat this dead horse with its own horseshoe.

But can I believe in my heart that this time is, in fact, the same as the others? Can I sincerely doubt my own insight? Peirce’s lesser-known maxim: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

Yes, yes, whatever. But have we forgotten how an inability to doubt is no more than intellect failing at its own limits, and then adding moral insult to intellectual injury by flattering the defeat as a triumph? We are persuaded by the proof of faith now? What are you, a nun?

But by all means, old man, have your laurel wreath — braided through with Algernon blossoms.

The choice:

I can inhabit my finite faith and speak from its heart. I can be I, here, now, wrapped up in the tragicomic oblivion that makes me who I am, and protects me from being anyone and everyone and no one else.

Or I can endlessly apologize to supercilious ventriloquist cynics staring down from the dislocated peaks of Tartarus.