A New Book-Reflection: “In the Spirit of Happiness”–(Part 1: Monks and the Matrix)

For the month of December, I thought I would take the time to write a few posts that focus on a book I read probably over 25 years ago that not only shaped much of my spiritual outlook, but also (looking back) was an early step on my journey to Orthodoxy. The book is In the Spirit of Happiness, written by the Monks of New Skete, which is a small Orthodox monastic community in upstate New York. They are actually more well-known for their books about dog training, so if you want some advice in that area, they’re a good resource on that!

For me, though, it is their In the Spirit of Happiness: Spiritual Wisdom for Living that speaks to me. It really is a book regarding spiritual disciplines within monasticism, but also about how anyone can practice those spiritual disciplines. If I can put it this way: it is about how everyone’s spiritual practices are, in a sense, monastic. In any case, like I said, I want to take this month to share the parts of the book that I really like—it is simple as that. It won’t be so much of a full-blown book analysis that I usually do, as it will be a series of posts where I share quotes and then share my own thoughts on them. That being said, I will organize these posts chapter by chapter.

Chapter 1: The Seeker…Asleep and Waking up…and The Matrix
The focus of the book is that of a fictional Seeker who comes to the monastery to seek advice about the Spiritual Life. I say “fictional” because, as stated in the book, the Seeker really is a conglomeration of a wide range of people who had come to the monastery over the years. So, even though the Seeker is fictional, the conversations and ideas expressed actually are rooted in real life people and encounters in the monastery.

Upon coming to the monastery, after his initial conversation with Father Laurence, the Seeker says that he’s come to see that “the whole world’s asleep—myself included.” In response, Father Laurence says, “It’s the same for all of us. The real question is how serious we are about waking up. How far are you willing to go? Life will do its best to rouse you, but you’re the only one who can wake yourself up.”

That exchange early on in the book always struck me. It probably helped that it was around that time that The Matrix came out, and Morpheus had a very similar conversation with Neo (when he was just Mr. Anderson!) about his willingness to “take the red pill” if he was serious about waking up and seeking the truth. Indeed, upon reflection, it was probably this book that caused me to interpret that first Matrix movie in the way I did—as a deeply significant story about seeking salvation.

The first step is to recognize that you’ve been “asleep” and “living in a dream world.” The second step thus becomes a challenge to make that crucial choice to wake up and start truly seeking. Of course, as soon as you make that choice, you soon find your world turned upside down. Just as Neo first wakes up, he asks why his eyes hurt, to which Morpheus says, “Because you’ve never used them.” A similar notion is here in chapter one, in the context of the inevitable wandering that takes place in one’s spiritual journey: “Wandering through darkness isn’t pleasant, but if you’re patient, your eyes adjust.”

One of the things I’ve seen, though, is this odd and sad dynamic at play. Many times, someone has a “spiritual” experience, starts a spiritual journey, and becomes a Christian. Yet after awhile, that person seems to come to a dead end and pretty much gives up…and oftentimes is somewhat bitter about the whole thing. There was a bad experience with a pastor or a church, or the person simply becomes disappointed with the clear and obvious faults other Christians have. Even though that person may say he actually feels liberated from that “religious straightjacket,” he still seems quick to bring that up quite often.

I don’t want to pass judgment on those kinds of situations, but I often wonder whether or not there was an actual surrender of the self. And this highlights what is seemingly oxymoronic about the Christian faith journey (at least as I’ve come to understand it). On one hand, as that first quote says, you are the one who has to choose to “wake up.” But on the other hand, there is the odd dynamic that most people don’t really know who they really are and are instead enslaved to a false self—a societal (and often commercial) construct that we are all pressured to conform to.

That is why we are so quick and fanatical to identify ourselves with a wide range of things…sports teams, fashion trends, political parties, etc. Sometimes, such things are relatively harmless, but sometimes they can be toxic and harmful. Sometimes I think that the recent explosion of the “Woke” and LGBTQ+ stuff over just these past five years or so is just a symptom of people in our increasingly secularized society searching for their identity and meaning. Without a spiritual rooting, a secularized society is rootless, and the result is people trying to root their identity into ever-shifting trends. I don’t mean to be flippant, but it ends up in insanity. It is trying to find one’s identity in how one “feels” about masculinity or femininity. It is identifying one’s “self” with nebulous and ever-changing feelings.

At the end of chapter one, it says, “Monastics or not, the universal human problem is that we’re often too busy to listen. We go about our lives forgetting who we are.” I think a better way to say that is too often we busy ourselves listening to false things…false narratives, false advertisements, etc…that are telling us false things about ourselves. Over time, when we attach our “selves” to those false things, the “self” we identify with becomes a “false self” itself, and we thus “forget who we truly are.” That person that may have made the decision to “wake up” and start his spiritual journey—that self—is the true self who is to be found in Christ, but that self is one we do not yet fully know yet. Deep inside ourselves, we have that sense of our true self, but all too quickly, when that spiritual journey goes dark, when we find ourselves “wandering in darkness,” we despair, and we find ourselves clinging to anything we can grasp. But since all we’ve known is “spiritual sleep” and that “commercialized dream world” of our highly secularized society, we end up grasping for falsities and fleeting images of false things. It’s much easier, and more immediately comforting, to cling to such familiarity. But the reality is it is a dream world, a matrix, a commercialized and secularized narrative that has been pumped into our heads our whole lives that says, “Stay asleep, let us keep pumping our stuff into your dream world–it’s safer that way.” But it’s not safe. It is a fleeting unreality.

Or if I can give this odd example—sometimes if you close your eyes and press against your eyeballs, you kind of “see stars” while your eyes are closed. Similarly, that’s what ends up happening, spiritually speaking, with a lot of people. They know, they can sense, there is something wrong with the world, so they choose to “wake up” and start a spiritual journey, but when the road gets dark, when they find their eyes hurt, instead of sticking to the path and letting their eyes adjust, they end up closing their eyes and pressing on them so they can “see stars.” But those stars aren’t real. Your eyes are actually closed, and you’ll never journey long enough to encounter the True Light because you’ve ended up focusing on the false light that is only in your head that is being manipulated by your own hands as you press upon your closed eyes.

When we grasp for those kinds of things—when we identify with the false light of our own making—we are showing just how uncomfortable we are with actually living with honest questions.

At the end of chapter one, it says this: “What characterizes a monk’s life are the questions that consume him, the same questions that all human beings have to face to truly know themselves. After all, there’s a monastic, contemplative dimension to every human being’s life, monastic or not.” When I look around at this world, I think that uncomfortableness with truly living with questions of ultimate meaning and identity, that unwillingness to patiently allow ourselves to grow into the answers to those ultimate questions, is the chief characteristic of today’s secularized and social media-driven individual. And sadly, that is the chief characteristic of many people who may have initially started on a spiritual journey, but who eventually veer off the path, so to speak.

The darkness of the path is intimidating and unnerving. It is much easier to close your eyes, listen to the fleeting voices of our secularized society, and just look for those “stars” inside your head and you press own your own close eyeballs, because you are convinced that that is when your identity lies—a matrix of your own making. But with your eyes closed, you can’t truly be a Seeker.

And the hard truth is that if you don’t seek, you never will find.