Nunc licet
This Latin sentence means “now it is permitted.”
It is from the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who in 1758 had a vision of a temple with these words inscribed above the entrance.
Swedenborg took it to mean that from that time on, “we are now allowed to use our intellect to explore the mysteries of faith.”
This prophecy came true. Since that time, people have been able to explore faith and religion far more frankly and openly than before. Some date the beginning of the New Age to that point.
Of course this freedom has opened the way to countless controversies—necessarily, because no two people agree 100 percent about everything.
Today we see a radical and at times violent tension between this new, open inquiry and those who hold to old, rigid doctrines. It is manifested in the countless skirmishes in the present culture wars.
This fact helped inspire the creation of this Substack.
I want it to be a place where people can come for a balanced, intelligent, but spiritually sensitive take on spirituality and religion of all types.
Let me introduce myself. I have some 50 years of experience studying and practicing mystical traditions of several types. I have also published hundreds of thousands of words—including 14 books—on these subjects, and they have given me some reputation for authority and trustworthiness here. (For my works, see my website, innerchristianity.com).
This background provides a framework for exploring spiritual questions from what I hope will be a fresh, intelligent and even profoun d point of view.
Today the spiritual tension of the West comes from a number of facts. In the first place, our age does seem to be experiencing a collective spiritual awakening (although it is more prominent in some sectors than others).
In the second place, we appear to be increasingly submerged in what the French esoteric philosopher René Guénon called “the reign of quantity.” All human values are viewed in terms of quantity, most obviously in terms of money.
Read your favorite news sources and see how many of them focus on the economic side of events. Education is evaluated in terms of how much money is being spent per student, often without the slightest regard for whether these dollars are being used in any intelligent way. Military spending is equated with military strength. Happiness is judged in terms of material possessions.
The poles between this spiritual awakening and this hardened materialism are sharply drawn. It is pointless to sermonize or moralize about the situation. But there is, I believe, great value in examining it and seeing where this profound spiritual tension will take us in the future.
The central goal of this Substack is to examine spirituality past, present, and future in the light of this tension. I will focus on the esoteric aspects of world religions: the often hidden mystical teachings that stand embedded within each faith, and which have different names in different contexts: Kabbalah in Judaism, esoteric Christianity (or what I have called “inner Christianity”), Sufism in Islam, and so on, as well as the deeper dimensions of Eastern religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.
I will try to discuss these matters as even-handedly as possible. (Personally, I am not affiliated with any religion.) This Substack will include comments on current happenings in religion as well as illuminating many points on spiritual teachings. It will also contain more substantial offerings for subscribers. In the first year, I will publish on a serial basis a revised and updated version of my book Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity.
On the lighter side, I will use this site to publish, in installments, my new novel Our Lady of Brattle Street. It is about a disgruntled Harvard professor who starts to see apparitions of the Virgin. Although it has satirical elements, it is fundamentally a serious book and discusses many of the most important but little-understood aspects of the spiritual path. As a bonus, I am throwing in the Secret of the Ages (no joke).
These, along with other substantial and otherwise unavailable writings, will be made available exclusively to Substack subscribers.
Substack is one of many technologies that are erasing long-established barriers—not only in thought, but in the interaction between author and audience. I will write on matters that I regard as important and indeed crucial without resorting to conventional publication, with all its inconveniences and restrictions.
My goal is to provide a space on the Internet where it will be possible to look into some of the deepest, most mysterious, and most central questions of the human experience and discuss them thoughtfully and responsibly in a safe and tolerant setting.
I hope you will join me.