#unstable universe introject

[yin-of-many-kins]

What's up fellow Wifies would we appreciate some userboxes on this fine afternoon

[hxrpy-hxre]

Minute/Min - 21-23 - he/him

MinuteTech introject from mainly UU

Sideblog for whatever - connected to @clownpierced

Shared account with sysmates - @unstxblesystem

[unstxblesystem]

WE'RE ONLY NOW FINISHING S1 BY THE WAY AND I DON'T WANNA WATCH UU ANYMORE‼️‼️‼️

-⚡️

[does-it-introject]

[hertalita]

Unstable Universe and Whitepine Introject Dump (we went a lil crazy)

✦  UU!Wemmbu Introject + UU!Eggchan Introject + UU!Spoke / UU!SpokeIsHere Introject

[PT: UU!Wemmbu Introject + UU!Eggchan Introject + UU!Spoke / UU!SpokeIsHere Introject. END PT]

(Left) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Wemmbu.

(Middle) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Eggchan. (Right) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Spoke / UU!SpokeIsHere.

✦  UU!Mapicc Introject + UU!Parrot / UU!Parrotx2 Introject + UU!Ash / UU!Ashswag Introject

[PT: UU!Mapicc Introject + UU!Parrot / UU!Parrotx2 Introject + UU!Ash / UU!Ashswag Introject. END PT]

(Left) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Mapicc.

(Middle) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Parrot / UU!Parrotx2. (Right) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Ash / UU!Ashswag.

✦  UU!Wifies Introject + UU!Minute / UU!MinuteTech Introject + UU!Dean / UU!Deanthebean9 Introject

[PT: UU!Wifies Introject + UU!Minute / UU!MinuteTech Introject + UU!Dean / UU!Deanthebean9 Introject. END PT]

(Left) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Wifies.

(Middle) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Minute / UU!MinuteTech. (Right) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Dean / UU!Deanthebean9.

✦  UU!Zam / UU!PrinceZam Introject + UU!Leo / UU!Leow0ok Introject + WP!Ivory Introject

[PT: UU!Zam / UU!PrinceZam Introject + UU!Leo / UU!Leow0ok Introject + WP!Ivory Introject. END PT]

(Left) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Zam / UU!PrinceZam.

(Middle) A flag for headmates who are introjects of UU!Leo / UU!Leow0ok. (Right) A flag for headmates who are introjects of WP!Ivory.

✦  WP!Clown / WP!ClownPierce Introject + WP!Ash / WP!Ashswag Introject + WP!Pyro / WP!Pyroscythe Introject

[PT: WP!Clown / WP!ClownPierce Introject + WP!Ash / WP!Ashswag Introject + WP!Pyro / WP!Pyroscythe Introject. END PT]

(Left) A flag for headmates who are introjects of WP!Clown / WP!ClownPierce.

(Middle) A flag for headmates who are introjects of WP!Ash / WP!Ashswag. (Right) A flag for headmates who are introjects of WP!Pyro / WP!Pyroscythe.

[PT: This blog is pro-endo, disrespect will not be tolerated. Anyone may use our terms. END PT]

More Unstable Universe and possibly Lifesteal introject flags coming soon perhaps? I forgot to make a UU!Clown / UU!ClownPierce one so I guess I'll be making more soon.

Taglist: @brainkeeper-service

[bah-pearl-cookie]

Hi! We're curious, what SMPs do you know exactly? We saw on your xeno blog a few you liked + DSMP BAH's you did, but we're still curious! (Both for request reasons & well. even if it sounds weird, we have MCYT autism & always want more SMPs & RPs 2 watch.)

LOL it's fine!! DSMP is probably the one we're the least familiar with, honestly; like we know the lore because we loved it back in 2020 but we don't care for it now (even though we still know the lore). Anyways, we absolutely adore and know these SMPs and minecraft series:

Lifesteal SMP

Kaboodle SMP

Content SMP

Unstable Universe

Whitepine

Glitch SMP

Parkour Civilization

PVP Civilization

Evbo's Simulation Series

Noob Civilization

Any of Evbo's Series' tbh

KWW Collab (End Barrens and Kenadian's Prison Series)

Those are the ones we love!! Strongly recommend them all :3 (if you have a short attention span uu and ksmp are COMMITMENTS though) We have I think like 3 lssmp introjects (one of whom is also a ksmp introject) and a gsmp introject too... ermm yeah YOU CAN STILL ASK FOR OTHER SMPS THOUGHH I dont mind gaining more autism

[fictionkinfessions]

this’ll probably seem really uncharacteristic of me, but if my last submission has anything to say about it, i am pretty generally uncharacteristic.

in ways, i’m much the same as i used to be … i still know what i want and take it, i’m still a bit weird and unstable, all of that good stuff. and i really don’t feel like i can guarantee with certainty that i’d never pull something like weirdmageddon again if i had the ability to.

but! i did want to say sorry. i know it probably doesn’t mean much, or anything, but i want to apologize so that’s what i’m going to do. the fact that i, or some other universe’s version of me, maybe all universes’ versions of me, was bad enough that everyone’s discomfort still lingers in this life … it makes me sad.

i have love in my heart, but i worry it’ll be seen as inauthentic. like i’m just saying it for the sake of flattery.

- bill cipher introject who is now very human … again

x

[zombiealiengutz]

MODZ INTROOO

—> ASENATH <—

AGE: 18

PRONOUNS & LABELS: Click here for my pronouns page!!

DISORDERS: Schizoaffective (bipolar + schizophrenia), Borderline, Maladaptive Daydreaming, Depersonalization Disorder, Autism, CPTSD

KINS: Jax (TADC), Michael Afton (FNAF), Nightmarionne (FNAF), Kiibo (DANGANRONPA), Herobrine (Minecraft), Alice Angel (BATIM), Popee (PTP), Spencer Reid (CRIMINAL MINDS)

MEDIAS: FNaF, BBIEAL, BATIM, Poppy Playtime, MCYT, Minecraft, Roblox, TADC

MOD TAGS: #👽 #nathposting #artnath

OTHER: I am very unstable and fluctuate between emotions quickly and sometimes come off as rude/mean. Partially because of my very grammatical typing.

Secondly, I am an alien and angel. If you don’t believe or view me like this: leave this blog and block me. I do not care for harassment.

I do not care for "reality checking" and find it rather rude, but from what I know of humans I cannot stop you by asking nicely. I will ignore you.

Lastly, me and William A. are married in an alternate universe, and it makes me quite disgusted to see people say they're "dating him" or "ship" him with other characters so please refrain from doing so.

—> AZAZEL <—

AGE: 17

PRONOUNS & LABELS: Click here for my pronouns page!!

DISORDERS: OCD, Autism, Depression, SAD (social anxiety disorder), Cotard’s Syndrome

KINS: Kyoko (DANGANRONPA), Mizuki (PJSK), Hiyoko (DANGANRONPA), Zooble (TADC), Gladion (POKEMON), Ame (NSO)

MEDIAS: Vocaloid, Steven Universe, Pokemon, Danganronpa, TADC, PJSK, NSO

MOD TAGS: #azazelsgarden #artzel

OTHER: I’m a zombehh xP !!!! I love Tally Hall but I do not support Joe Hawley. DO NOT INTERACT IF YOU DO. /SRS. FUCK OFF. Also I selfship with celestia ludenberg :D

—> GABRIEL <—

AGE: 17

PRONOUNS & LABELS: Click here for my pronouns page!!

DISORDERS: DID, Autism, ADHD, GAD, CPTSD

KINS: Shuichi (DANGANRONPA), Pomni (TADC), Sundrop (FNAF), Chara (UNDERTALE)

MEDIAS: FNAF, Undertale, Danganronpa, Roblox

MOD TAGS: #🐾 #gabeart

OTHER: HII >_< i'm an introject of infected (regretevator)! doubles & anti-endos plz kindly dni :3 i am a ragdoll cat otherkin!! also i dont rly know how to use tumblr... soz ^^' i'm dating lampert! dni if u think u are also dating lampert bcz u are not lolzz

—> DNI <—

pro contact

proship / comship

loli / shota

anti shifter

terf / truscum / transmed

reality checkers

homophobic / transphobic

racist

anti furry

anti endo

anti therian / anti otherkin

anti selfship

ships/selfships celestia ludenberg, william afton, and/or lampert

[manicpixieblacksheep]

Hiiii🐶

⭐️ I'm Julian, but you can also call me Gwynn, Robin, Forest, Hyacinth, Quinn/ Quincy, Andrew, or Skye. I do, also, use the cultural names Kairos and Lynx! I consider Gwynn cultural as well, but it's my second main name that I use irl, so it's listed with the rest :)

🏳️‍⚧️ He/ They/ Fae/ It pronouns ☆☆☆, transmasculine, genderfaun, solarian/ novarian, demiboy, rosboy, xenogender (mainly starwashic, pupgender, and catgender), agender sometimes, t4t, demisexual, and gay af (also engaged!!)

🪻 I'll be 25 as of now!!!

♾️ AuDHD, dyscalculia, dyslexia, C-PTSD, BPD and bipolar type 2, traumagenic plural (I don't support endos and I'm not sorry about it), maybe OCD, physically disabled, and hoping to be a service dog handler soon af (golden retriever, english lab, greyhound, clumber spaniel, or standard poodle for those interested)! Please prepare for infodumps about dogs (or animals in general), especially poodles, lots of botany and horticultural rants, and a great many pictures of my stuffed animals!

🦚 I study and practice my each of my culture's pre-colinialism spiritualities, I'm also a spiritual and psychological therian (more info under the cut). I'm cancer sun, taurus moon, and gemini rising, born year of the (wooden I think?) dragon, wren, and oak! Hail your fucking self!!!🪶

🎉 This is a side blog, I have two other blogs (@gwynn-games and @gwynns-world), I'm also a furry, a plush collector (POSIC but not objectum/ plushum but also not anti those things), and proud cat dad, I enjoy gaming, reading, the arts, body mods, queer cartoons, studying animals and plants, D&D, and cooking/ baking. I'll also mention that while I have no DNI, I do check everyone that interacts with my blog in my spare time, and I do block bigots, endos, and AI "artists"

✂️ Plurality, alterhuman, and fursona info under the cut below!

🫒 I will mention before continuing that some of my alters are a bit shy and won't really be saying anything on this blog, so they won't be introduced. Only alters who interact with my blog will get an intro! Also, we are very blurry and struggle to figure out who's in front most of the time, but we passively influence each other all the time, so it doesn't matter much.

🦄 Starting off, there's Julian/ Gwynn! He's our host and has a better intro above the cut, but he's the most common fronter and therefore kinda the star of the show. He's very magical and mystical, full of whimsy, and has very punk, leftist values with lots of queerness. He's also at least kinda frontstuck. Very creative, idealistic, and tries to be optimistic but struggles with it.

🕷 Alison/ Alice (She/ Her, They/ it, and sometimes She/ He), 29ish, a protector and anger holder and/ or has a huge hand in our regulation processes I believe. She's the secondary host and fronts very often, is much more adult than the rest of us, and is actually the oldest alter who has an age. She's transfemme, genderfluid, and genderqueer. I do also think she might be based off of Vidia from the Tinkerbell movies, but she's not an introject.

🦋 Milo/ Wren/ Atlas Moth (He/ They), 13-15ish, is a middle alter who likes to draw and play/ swim in creeks. He's heavily associated with boyhood, has an unstable sense of self, and likes to copy the other alters if he likes their ideas.

🦊 Scarlet/ Kit, She/ They/ He, 17-19ish, another middle alter. Really likes non-classic rock and Hot Topic. Secretly likes classical music and ballet. Mainly associated with girlthinghood, overly romanticizes Jinx from Arcane, and relates a bit too hard to Spinel from Steven Universe. She really likes the Electra Heart album as well.

🏵 Usagi, any pronouns and ageless. Loves bunnies, is a joy holder, the happiest alter in the headspace sanctuary! Big fan of nostalgia and stuffed animals as well. The happy sunshine baby of all time! Prefers being in nature all the time, or reading books, and the aesthetic of age regression without the practice of it.

🧚🏽 Ivy/ Faye, She/ Her, sometimes They/ Fae, about 6-8 years old, our only little (to my knowledge), and a double introject of Tinkerbell herself and Ivy from the My Sister The Vampire series. She's kinda like our inner child, and she likes fairies, ponies and horses, childhood interests of ours, pixie dust (gold glitter), fawns, cute bugs, music boxes, cows, and other sweet cottagecore things.

🌵 Marlowe, He/ Him, ageless (?). Very creative, doesn't like being disturbed, has a lot of boundaries, really likes Plushie Dreadfuls, very scary when angry but typically shy and quiet.

🪼🐂 Dimitri, He/ They/ She, ageless, fabulous, and confident. Very comfortable in their skin, is a fusion of two confidence alters (Terrance and Indigo), loves the Pixar movie Soul and many other slice of life movies (like The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty and Life Of Pi), loves singing along to the Shrek 2 soundtrack and doing car karaoke with friends, loves jazz and confidence rap (the kind of rap that's very uplifting of the self and such), a true philosopher, and is always down for carbs because life is too short to avoid joy over dumb societal rules that stunt your growth as a person!

🌫 Denise/ Mouse, doesn't really use pronouns and would prefer direct mentioning please! Is everywhere and nowhere at all times like a mist sometimes, other times Mouse is much more concentrated to one area and is kinda just brainfog and amnesia personified. Denise speaks very quietly with very few words, but everything Denise says commands and grips the entire room. Always whispering and mumbling, and is typically very sweet. Mouse enjoys sleepovers with our other alters as well! Very lonely.

🐾 As for theriotypes, I'm a holothere and polytherianthrope, so let's get that out of the way!

I'm a canine, feline, equine, and cervine cladotherian (including mythical, supernatural, and monstrous versions of each animal)

I'm a valais blacknose, bighorn, hebridian, and jacob sheep

I'm a harbor and ring seal

I'm a bunny and wolpertinger

I'm a stegosaurus, raptor, and plesiosaur paleotherian, maybe more on the paleo front

I'm a dragon therian

I'm an arctic stream, koi pond, and alpine lake conceptkin

I'm a blue fairy penguin, flamingo, owl of some form, a bearded vulture, a peacock, and possibly a harpy eagle

I'm a crocodile or alligator (likely a croc though) and maybe some form of monitor lizard

I'm questioning if I'm some kind of amphibian or fish, and I may also be a type of digging tarantula or jumping spider mayhaps?

I also have a lot of fictional hearttypes, lots of paras, and potentially a few headmate introjects that might mimic hearttypes but this post would go on forever if I mentioned them soooo if you see a post about shifts that aren't my theriotypes, mind ya business lol

I do also feel connections to every single creature and biome for spiritual reasons, but this doesn't always link back to theriotypes and is sometimes just a spiritual thing for me! Sometimes it does make me question if I'm pantherian though!

🧸 As for fursonas, my main fursona is a red panda named Aster who is autumnal themed and closely based on me irl! My main plushsona is a flamingo named Larry, who I adopted from @/mushpuppies a few years back on an old account. He has big 'dad on vacation' vibes and is kinda like my big "I'm a summer baby" sona. My main ponysona is named Sweet Dreams (and I have commissioned art of him by @/canis hooves), and he's half unicorn, half zebra. He does dream magic and is a supreme herbalist! Lastly, my furbysona is named Chimichanga Thee Whole Enchilada, and he doesn't have much lore, but he's very chaotic and silly. I do think he looks a bit too similar to Aster, though, so I'd like to potentially redesign him completely. Maybe I'll make him into a clown furby?👀

🪺 Thaaaank you for reading if you made it this far down! I hope you have a magical, whimsical, joyful kind of day!!

[the-blorb-system]

Actually same,, you have a talent to put into words a lot of thoughts I personally have and Express it in a way I can never even though I sat on wording this previous ask for almost an hour. I guess my mind is just scrambled cause I talk about topics people don't want me to bring up so they hide most of the information.

Taking existence in already existing stories and tales, establishing yourself in it and twisting it to fit your vision.. It was roughly what i did for the majority of the time.

Omg the golden wish fish,, of the old fisherman and his cruel entitled wife.. you just gave me a vision into my childhood that I completely forgot about,, genuinely thank you I am going to shelf it for later pondering.

I was a kid who didn't have a lot of interests as a kid, aside of reading and Sitting in her own mind. I hated social interactions because I recognized I wasn't as them all, not to mention I couldn't really tell anyone about this unique imaginary friend of mine who would always be here for me and told me to keep him a secret.

So most of my adventures varied on existing tales like disney (that's how I came to know of alice's tale,, which became my 2th most favorite comfort because I found so many associations between her tale and my own life. I have a Google doc somewhere where I stated the exact associations and likenesses)

Or on some popular books I read as a kid, such as the secret garden (a place which existed in our innerworld for a time), a little princess, and little women. I always liked classical literature.

I also became a fan of multiple books that were our earliest alters after the original group, like nathan byrn from the half bad trilogy which was a very powerful protector and the somewhat physical manifestation of our nonverbality (still exist and appear even to this day), or malcolm polstead from the book of dust trilogy who was the first variation of our scouts, and lead with the curiosity only an 11 year old boy who ran from the law and discovered the world with his canoe can do (his traces disappeared, I can only assume he is fused but maybe Luna know more than I do about it).

Yes we had a group I personally call "the original group" (you could view it on SP). They were the first to become. The first Introjects. The first alters. After me and E. At least. They came from the media that became my ultimate #1 favorite comfort media which I derived my name from.

But the reason I never associated them with the media was because their stories, their background, their history and adventure, became so different from it that I believed I just made my own universe of it.

Like yeah brain I get I was severely bullied and ostracized at school and home also wasn't perfect, but why would a group of severely traumatized kids sent to a distant world to save it from destruction Help me in any way?? They're all way more unstable than me if we go to the low blow of comparing trauma :/

. . . Ok now that I think about it a moment more I guess I get why, beyond the "you're autistic and it was your comfort media and special interest".

That's actually something that I take a lot of interest in personally, and a project of mine.

Which I can explain if you want

- Digi

I completely understand that, actually. At least through the lens of my own experiences. Many of my fictive headmates especially are arguably way more trauma of a much more severe caliber than I do, but I think that's why I latched onto them enough for them to become alters.

Definitely because Special Interest type reasons, but also because, you know... if someone's been through worse than me it means they already know how to handle what I've been through, right? That was the thinking as a kid, at least. If you've had to patch a shattered leg so many times then helping me with the cut on my arm will be nothing. And there was probably an aspect of "if we have a caretaker or a protector modeled after someone the host is more likely to want to listen to when it's important, they'll be more effective at their job.

That's my understanding of it, in simpler terms, but I would be really interested to hear how that works for you!

Also, thank you for the compliment! I actually take a lot of pride in my phrasing, even though it's not always consistent. Sometimes I could regale you with the most eloquent of tales regarding the happenstances of my livelihood, and other times words stupid I want not that because what is happening, right? )=<

In any case I'm glad I've been able to express some concepts for you that aren't always easy to understand or put into words. I hope that's helped!

-Lizzy

[noblest-roman-of-them-all]

I might- will probably regret this later, but c'est le vie or whatever, but there is something especially painful about looking at something you've posted and looking at your source and going "Yeah, that tracks.".

On the one hand of course it makes sense, of course there is...connection and resemblance there. My brain saw something in someone and found such a strong "You put it into words" moment that it caused me to develop as I am. Of course it makes sense for me or others in our system to look back at a post and know it was me who made it because it sounds feasibly like something my source would say.

That doesn't mean I'm not miffed by it.

In part, I think it is the word "fictive" on its own. Another member of our system once said it made him feel like it was imply he wasn't real and I think I understand now what he meant. Another part of it is...the discussions around fictives. Sometimes it feels like we're being talked about in the same room while everyone pretends like we're not there.

When you're part of system it can be hard to know what is you being a multifaceted alter unto yourself and what is passive influence or even, in my case at least, a possible subsystem. I suspect that has a lot to do with why I introjected as I did. It wasn't just one problem but several my brain saw in my source and compounded into me.

And thinking about it that wording... Actually that may be a thing we've realized before. That it wasn't just me, but several fragments that saw him and went "It's me!" and now we're all just stacked on top of each other trying to hold ourselves together in the semblance of a single alter. Like an unstable gem fusion. (Thanks, Dr. Picani. We've never actually watched Steven Universe.)

I don't think I feel like I'm allowed to be multifaceted on my own. I don't think I feel like I'm allowed to be...fully developed. "Parts of a whole". I do understand where thay comes from, why it's used, why it's technically correct, but it does feel...restrictive at times. It feels...belittling. Like if I'm going to try to claim I'm a person unto myself or behave like I am my own individual or person, that I am inherently being anti-recovery. So it's not allowed. I have to be only a part.

I know there is discourse around parts language, I don't speak on that for anyone, but myself. If it works for you, please continue to use it and please don't be upset or come at me for saying I find it personally harmful. I don't mean harmful in the general negative connotation, but that it stings sometimes. It causes me, personally, emotional discomfort.

I'm aware I'm part of a system, that I share my life, body, and brain with the others here, I wouldn't do anything that would cause them harm for the sake of my own individuality. But I think growing up there was a lot of sacrifices made, a lot of individuality, the concept of individuality, was sacrificed for the sake of fitting in, to avoid attention drawn to us, to avoid social and emotional traumas, so now as an adult, especially an adult away from that original environment we're striving to figure out who we actually are. Who we are away from expectations and fear of judgement or scolding. I just get the job of holding the awareness of it. I embody it a little more than the other, I'm more distressed by it than the others.

And again I look at my source and I just. Well, it makes sense. He's a mirror in so many ways. Our own struggles and hurts staring back at us through the distance of a screen, helping make sense of all that emotiona hurt and turmoil.

I'm aware that I'm here, presenting as I am because of the things my brain saw in him, saw that reflection, and grabbed in and held so tightly to an identification of problems that had so long gone unaddressed that it resulted in me. But sometimes I do feel like I'm blowing things out of proportion to fit the mold, like I'm trying to become like him. But the truth us, I already was, I just didn't know it.

I am part of a system. I am an introject of a fictional character. I'm the "same hat" and "it me" memes come to life. I'm learning to navigate trauma, and learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings. I'm learning that I am allowed to exist. I think maybe being an introject is, or plays a part in, my sever need for external validation. Because external validation was the thing that helped me to feel seen enough to really develop. I'm allowed to be here, I'm allowed to exist. I'm allowed to explore my personhood. I'm allowed to be real. I'm allowed to exist. I'm allowed to be me. I'm allowed to want to be seen.

Thinking about the urge to doom scroll until I find that one post that gives me the "you put it into words!" feeling to give some semblance of human connection and lessen the feelings of isolation and help give me an idea of who I am as person.

[hxrpy-hxre]

The pain at my side

[saeculorum-amen]

Gaslighting, Otherness, and Gospel

Experiential literature.

The Gospels are not persuasive. Although Matthew may in places attempt to fit Christ into Jewish prophecy in order to place him into the context of the messiah long-awaited, that is at most something necessary, a foundation for the actual argument, and an argument which does not appear explicitly. There is no recounting of facts, there is no framing of what exactly one should do in response to reading them. It feels to me less like they are trying to persuade you about something, and more that they are inviting you into something.

I feel that most acutely in the Gospel of Mark, with its immediacy, and in the Gospel of John, with its intensity of emotion. These are works of experiential writing which try to bring you into the experience that the apostles shared. They cannot name how this will transform you, but they hope that it might, by the experience of it, do so nonetheless, as it transformed each of them in their individual ways. If we imagine the foundation of the synoptic gospels being records of the sayings of Jesus, this is all the more clear: not statements of fact to be absorbed, but the experience of listening at the feet of Jesus, and feeling flashes of insight, glimpses of the Kingdom, as he spoke.

Perhaps the religious as a whole is of that nature, an experiential reality which can be glimpsed, but not measured and recorded — but which can, perhaps, be shared.

I find that in the letters of Paul, certainly, as I enter into his struggle to lead Christian communities, and feel the sense of responsibility that he felt, by virtue of the love that he felt for each and every person. I hear not only what he said to them, and how he told them to live, but what it felt like to say those things, to implore them. What his hopes were, so much more so than his teachings. What he taught is only sometimes relevant to my life, and the lives of those with whom I preach and teach, but the posture of love and hope and concern, of steadiness and urgency, of patience and frustration: that is always relevant. So, too, to imagine what it felt like to be in those communities, and to hear Paul’s letters written to us and our fellow-travellers in this strange and difficult way.

Much of the religious record, indeed, is concerned with the efforts to convey the experience of something which may be universal, or may be profoundly rare, but which nonetheless cannot be collapsed down into a set of facts and figures. The bush which burns and is not consumed. The flood. Ezekiel’s calling. John’s revelation. The experience of being Jonah. The experience of being the crowd which calls for the execution of Christ. We enter into and share of these things, however familiar or foreign they may be. We gain a facility with inhabiting them, whether to find our way to awe, or to gain the conviction required to decide to live differently.

Enlightenment and disappointment.

I am very much a child of the enlightenment, although I am at an age where it feels increasingly preposterous to call myself a child of anything. I was, though: I grew up surrounded by personal computers, in a household led by a deeply gifted engineer who had worked on the Apollo program. My family talk about how I was programming using the macro language of an early text editor before I had even entered school. I tell that story, too, as part of the foundational mythos by which I continually recreate my own life. It captures something very real about who I was raised to be, and perhaps hints at some more elusive things about who I deeply am.

I am no great and gifted historian or philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it seems a meaningful referent for that upbringing. I was taught to see the world in an exacting and scientific way, and to reject things which were mere superstition, or otherwise irrational. I was formed to master language, not as a way to communicate with other people, but as a way to be precise about ideas and facts. If something was true, there would be some evidence for it which could be clearly described, and provably measured — and if it was true, it would be true always and everywhere.

That is a very narrow world, more narrow than the world of Hume or Locke or Spinoza — a kind of fundamentalism of objectivity, in which there was very little room for a person to live, for a person to exist as a subject, rather than an object. The ideal human being was a data logger, not even a flawed individual striving after objectivity.

It grated at me that I could not determine whether other people experienced colours as having the same perceptual quality as I did. I was acutely sensitized to the ways in which adults seemed to be arbitrary and capricious, and to engage in proof by assertion of the legitimacy of all their rules. There was no rigour, no structure which really captured the rough edges I continually ran up against in the course of living. Indeed, I had my own experiences rejected as fabrications and lies, even experiences that would have been readily measurable, like allergies that were present from my early life, and instantly recognized once I sought diagnosis as an adult.

This created all kinds of inward and outward problems. I doubted my own reality, to the point of living with debilitating panic attacks in which my own perspective seemed to fight for control with some other realm of possibilities. I could not trust the ground beneath me, because what if some hidden law, some unknown variable, were to govern it to give way instead. I felt swallowed up in the ocean-like waters of the universe itself, as though there was no way for me to get to dry land, to real life, to the right plane of existence. I had to work hard to learn that the world, and I, would continue to exist as I went from one point to another, rather than disappearing in a kind of unstable variation of Zeno’s paradox transposed into the cosmology of simulation theory.

This introjected doubt was projected onto the world around me, too. How could I know whether what someone else said was true? How could I trust anything which happened outside of my view? Hell, how could anyone know anything?

The politics of doubt.

This pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion was not unique to my objective fundamentalist upbringing. The authority of measurement is almost unquestionable in our society, which prefers technocracy to anything more sentimental. While public debate may take on the rhetorical character of aesthetics, we find a way to turn our rules for action into something you can quantify. You will always be able to know whether or not you can cut down a tree, or dump waste into a waterway, by using a published table of figures. You don’t have to stop and think about whether you should or not, which might be unsettling and subjective, only whether you’re allowed to, which is knowable.

In the grip of my epistemological wounds, I found as a teenager that a certain kind of defiant libertarianism held enormous appeal. Political correctness was a favourite topic in the discourse I was exposed to at home and at school, which is perhaps the ideal target for this politics of sneering contempt and doubt. How was anyone supposed to know what they could or couldn’t say? Who got to decide, who got to make the list? How could someone else tell you not to say a word when they couldn’t give you criteria for deciding so? Where was the proof that words did harm?

You could prove to someone that words were meaningless by shouting the words you weren’t supposed to say, over and over. It’s just a sound, after all. It only signifies something if you let it, and it’s only dangerous if someone does something real and measurable while they happen to be saying the word, at which point the word doesn’t much seem to matter, does it? So you make the sound again and again, while behaving in an upright and respectable manner in all other respects, so that you are above reproach. Whoever hears it and feels pain has inflicted the harm upon themselves.

It’s one of those things that’s true as far as it goes, but doesn’t actually lay claim to as much as it thinks it does. It’s like treating science and religion as overlapping magisteria, as though their claims and methods existed within the same realm and spoke to the same things at all times and in all places. We recognize that doing that does violence equally to religion and to science, because the tools of one are not the right tools for the other. God exists beyond measure, but if God is calling us to build an ark, we had better use tools and measures to guide its construction, and not our ecstasy and wonder. Science sinks in the deep water of religion and vice versa.

This doubting suspicion loves not only to attack what seems arbitrary to it, but to mistake subjectivity for a compromise of objectivity. Hume thought that art was not entirely objective, but that an art critic could, with sufficient dedication, strive for objectivity in how they engaged with their work. You can use your subjective experience to serve something other than your personal biases, albeit imperfectly.

However if someone claims a subjective experience which is outside of the sort of teenage libertarian I was, someone steeped in suspicion and anxiously desperate for the objective, then perhaps it simply does not exist. If a Black person describes their systemic oppression, that seems like a fanciful and implausible explanation for the material facts of their existence. If an Indigenous person describes being shot at by strangers, that seems to border on the fantastic or the farcical. I think of the oft-repeated anecdote about Freud deciding that if all of the daughters of upstanding men claimed to have been sexually abused, this was a sign of rampant gendered delusion, and not rampant sexual abuse by upstanding men. That seemed more likely.

It always seems more likely, to the person who is troubled by the great divide between their own subjective experiences and the subjective experiences of others, that the other is at best confused, but perhaps more likely is lying and being manipulative. It stirs up a cognitive dissonance about the limitations of our own reality, when in fact it is not a threat to the objective reality of our existence, but merely to our omniscience.

So it is that the suspicious person rejects the subjective accounts of others as being inherently untrustworthy. They might engage in what has been called “sealioning”, in which they ask repeatedly for proof, they state their willingness to be convinced, and simply demand that the other person gain legitimacy by finding a way to do so. If their claims were real, after all, they would be able to find some way to do so. The fact that they cannot is not recognized as the game itself being rigged, but as proof that the suspicion was warranted.

To lie and to illumine.

We talk in the information age about information warfare, about the ability of governments to sow doubts about basic facts and to generate confusion about what is true, to the point that coördinated action becomes impossible, and the whole is weakened. We know full well the danger of conspiracy theories, for individuals and for our collective health and well-being, whether it takes the form of anti-vaccine agitation, or paranoid collective fantasies which lead to people ending their own lives, or others’, to stem the tide of global corruption. To someone committed to a politics of doubt steeped in their own epistemological wounds, even this may be a challenging statement: who is to decide who is allowed to make facts, and how? How can you know whether something is a conspiracy theory? How is a conspiracy theory any different to claims of systemic racism? Either they’re all fantastic and unfalsifiable, or none of them are.

The most deeply wounded will not settle for simply resisting belief of others’ subjective accounts, but in fact feel a deep pressure to convince others to lose their faith, too. Governments and market manipulators may know the value of lying, but the wounded make lying itself their weapon. Their goal is not to convince someone of a different truth, but that no one is to be trusted.

They do this by lying, by being disingenuous, to the point of gaslighting, i.e. of trying to get people to doubt their own sanity. They talk about this among themselves as a kind of clownishness, as though they were jesters for the masses, who could bring out uncomfortable truths by defying convention and expectation. It is a chaotic clownishness, however, with no principles and unspeakable truth. There is a reverie in disruption itself.

Some of them end up promoting a kind of sadistic nihilism, but equally common seems to be falling back on an anti-intellectual faith in the status quo. The former seems obvious, but the latter is more surprising. In essence, since there is no grounds on which to make the fuzzy decisions about society, those things should not be changed. There’s no way to engage in creation from a blank slate of how a society should be ordered, but we happen to have a society nonetheless. Therefore there is no position from which action to change society can be taken, except by objective and rational means.

If someone advocates, then, for deviance from the status quo for subjective reasons, it is useful not only to demand that they prove themselves (which they cannot), but to remind them and everyone around them that people are unreliable. They will lie brazenly, even openly, like the teenage libertarian saying a swear word or a slur repeatedly. They want to show you how effortless it is, that anyone can do it, that anyone can make themselves do it. They want to show you that mere words are meaningless, and other people are not to be trusted.

The demands of empathy.

I do experience these people (and I have had more dealings with them than I would like) as wounded, rather than as master manipulators. I think that they are telling the truth, albeit perhaps not intentionally, when they say that they would like to be convinced. They would like to be surprised by an argument, to find out that there is something they have been missing. They do so feel like something is missing, but nothing seems to be able to make it appear.

They watch videos of people suffering, even dying, wondering how it can be that it has ceased to stir up emotion. They read with delight accounts of the stalking of people who don’t seem entirely real to them. In a way, they have fallen into the perennial trap of the gnostic heresy: the belief, perhaps, that there is a divine spark in them, but the suspicion that it is not present in everyone.

Their rhetoric talks about non-player characters, people either not enlightened enough to be fully alive, or who are perhaps not actually people at all. This language comes from the world of role-playing games, in which some characters are directed by the dungeon master or the game itself in order to provide a backdrop for the hero’s life, and to create the difficulties that impede their progress. The non-player character is an explanation both for the seeming absence of the divine spark in others, and also for the frustrations and failures of the individual’s life, for which no other explanation can be accepted.

There is something so innocently wounded at the core of this, like the teenager who discovers at their first kiss that the music does not swell, the lighting does not change, and their perspective does not shift as the camera pans in or out. There is an intensity which is missing from life itself that we know must exist because we see it in movies. Where has it gone, and who has taken it? This leads either to a solipsistic nihilism, or to a politics not only of doubt but of resentment. Someone else is programming the game to be against me, which I know because by every objective measure I should be winning.

The trouble is that the experience of other people’s subjective realities, the thing that lets you glimpse the divine spark in them, is to be open to the experience of them. You have to move beyond the world of ideas and wishes. You have to stop watching from afar. This seems pointless or even destructive, though, when you expect only another disappointment. Empathy comes slowly, and starts with the leap of faith of seeing the other person as a subject like you, too. There is a self-reinforcing structure to these things, and their reality is purely relational. It is not the case that if it were real you’d be able to directly apprehend it against your will.

The pain.

I spent several hours recently dealing with someone engaging in sealioning who was being openly dishonest, with the goal of displacing outpourings of empathy for a marginalized community, and creating a landscape of doubt instead. I thought that that was the end of the story, but as I digested the experience and let myself think about what was going on in the interaction, I found something truly unpleasant come over me. For the rest of that day, I became enraged at interactions which felt emotionally insubstantial, or in which another person seemed to be acting by rote. This caught me by surprise, as although those things might annoy me normally, the intensity of my reaction was wildly out of proportion. Indeed, I found a part of myself almost felt compelled to show that I could act out of proportion.

There were two forces at work there. In the one instance, I had simply spent time exploring a pattern of mind that I then found myself inhabiting a little bit. After all, it wasn’t a world of ungrounded fantasy, but an outlook which has a few kernels of truth that have been massively distorted, and that massively distort the experience of the world in turn. In fact, it was a world view I had known very well, and had worked hard to leave behind, through developing relationships with other people, through my theological development, and through lots, and lots, of psychotherapy.

I have probably even been primed by the pandemic to return to that experience of the world. I don’t leave the house much, I don’t see friends, and I spend too much time in front of computer screens. People exist as ideas, as abstract things I think about. My own feelings feel very far away when my life starts to fall back into that shape, and I normally work hard to keep it from being that way. And yet.

So those old disappointments were present to me, and brought their emotional weight back up to the surface. They were accompanied by a double urgency, however, in the form of a second force: reality testing.

I wanted desperately to remember what it was to feel, to feel empathy, to experience the subjective reality of another person’s life. I urgently needed to remember that the wounded worldview was wrong, and I lashed out in hopes of finding something that would make me feel something. I did — I felt bad. That repeated a few times, until it started to feel almost absurd. I knew better, but it all felt less substantial than I wanted it to.

That was very hard at the time, and it’s very hard to share. It’s still a little challenging, no doubt worsened by the limitations of pandemic life as I have experienced it, but I know what the path back looks like. I’ve let myself talk with friends to remember what other people are like, and I’ve got plans to see some friends for a connection that will be more substantial. Something where my attention isn’t split between a dozen open tabs, or with all the work tasks hanging over my head, or with the task of driving, or thinking about how to respond to a violent troll on social media.

The hermeneutic of curiosity.

It is a core religious value for me that other people exist, and that they have an interior life like mine, and a subjective reality that is every bit as full and real as mine. Jung talks about psychic reality, i.e. subjective reality, as being the most real thing there is, because it is the very thing we apprehend and experience most directly, entirely unmediated. I find that powerfully compelling, and as a religious person I find it enticing.

The religious task, after all, involves that sharing of experiential reality which cannot be reduced to facts. Gregory of Nyssa talks about the inability of the mind to grasp things which are beyond spatial metaphors and reasoning. So it is that I find other people a holy thing: filled with otherness, but enticingly close. But if you engage with another person as an object, you will not find those secret and elusive things: their interiority, their soul. You can glimpse, though, and how glorious it is to glimpse, something of the inner life and the spirit by opening yourself to them, by listening deeply to them, and by engaging in substantive conversation and exploration together. This is the religious task itself.

We might think of the religious task as contemplation of the divine, and looking for something of the divine subject to reveal something of themselves to us, but as the First Letter of John reminds us, we can see one another, and we cannot see God. If we are going to learn how to experience the intersubjective reality of union with the divine, we surely start by being open to doing so with the other person. After all, if you will not experience the interior reality of the other person, who is so like you in every respect, how can you expect to experience the interior offering of the divine, who is utterly unknowable in every respect?

Perhaps it’s easier with God because there’s no material distractions, no illusion that the other person exists primarily to be beautiful, or primarily to frustrate us. There is no possibility that God is a non-player character. A non-player character has substance but no essence, while God is pure essence. God is the energies which make the game go, and is not programmed by anything, as we, ourselves, are at least a little programmed, by language, by culture, by society.

We have rightful yearnings for the other, but they ought to be mutually reinforcing. We are captivated by the beauty, by the difference, or something else enticing about the other, but we are not to mistake them for an object to be possessed, a way to access beauty or something we lack within ourselves. We are called to relationship, to the interpenetration of mind and spirit, by our yearning, and to let ourselves yearn for the transcendent beauty the same way we are enticed by material beauty. The transcendent other, too, loves and made each and every living being, and fills them with breath, so if we are curious about God, we ought to be curious also about God’s people.

This hermeneutic of curiosity has to not only be open to the subjective, but has to not count the cost. Paul talks about this as foolishness, as something which is wise in God’s sight, but which the world will look at and think is absolutely reckless. This is being willing to try to help someone even if it might not work. This is giving of your own resources even if you might get nothing in return. This is being willing to risk believing someone, even though you know that people lie.

Yes, Christ sent the disciples out, and sends all of us out, with an admonition to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. You can wonder about the motives of others. You should be curious about your own suspicion, even, because it might be telling you something valuable. The question is if you are willing to be transformed for the Kingdom of God: if you would rather believe something which causes you to act more kindly than is required, or if you would rather avoid taking any material risk, even if it causes you to disbelieve someone whose suffering you could have alleviated.

The empty tomb.

Martin Buber shares a piece of Hasidic wisdom which suggests that everything that exists, everything that God has created, has some purpose for the person of faith, some religious value, which must be found, even atheism. The value of atheism being that it calls us to act as though we were responsible for the state of the world, rather than God. It can be so tempting to engage in spiritual bypassing by displacing all responsibility off to God, but we are sojourning together on this little piece of rock, and whether we like it or not, this coëxistence is what we have been called to live rightly within. It’s not about whether we would live well together in the Kingdom of God, but whether we are willing to live as we would in the Kingdom even now.

This brings us to the knife’s edge of disappointment once again. What if it doesn’t feel good? What if it doesn’t feel right? What if it isn’t good enough? Perhaps it is better not to try.

That would be foolishness in the wrong realm. That would be expecting things to feel right, here and now, when in fact it might be very uncomfortable to do what God calls us to. This bitterness may, like the scroll Ezekiel eats, come to taste sweet once we let ourselves enter into it, but it may just be difficult. I think of how many of us in adulthood expect that at some point all the grown-up tasks will become easy and effortless, because they looked that way to us as kids, when in fact they remain a slog and a time-sink, and that’s just part of the sad reality of life.

There has to be something we believe in more than gratification, and more than that our success and our feelings of meaning look like the climactic scenes in movies. For me it is the joy of encounter with God and with other people. It is the substantial beauty of seeing what is real and loving it because it is real, and not because it appears as I wish it would. I do not always manage that. Still, I know that is what I want to give my heart to, even if it’s difficult.

If you love something, you can follow where it leads, instead of perpetually being frustrated that it isn’t going down the path you expected. If you really need to go down that path, go down it, but don’t imagine that something else owes it to you to make the way clear. This is the realm of the Holy Spirit, which may lead you to two divergent paths, not to test you, but because that is what is real. Something which is beyond the spatial things the mind can understand, but which may exist in the reality of God. It may be that the paths will merge after a time, and it may be that we could take either path just as well, and that they really do diverge. Perhaps there is more to us than just one thing.

We are invited to experience the reality of what is, not what we expect. This is what the Gospels call us to: to share in the slow revelation by Jesus of some truths about us, about God, and about the world, and the image of a life which awaits us, and a life which is possible for us here and now. Jesus points out again and again that these things are all the out-pouring of a single truth that cannot be named, but that can be gestured at and felt among us all the same. He tells us that love made us and calls to us, and that we can live according to love, too, but that this is not the path of light and life. Love encompasses all that is, and love leaves nothing out.

You cannot tell someone that. There is no fact to be conveyed. There are a set of truths which must constellate in your mind, and which as soon as they seem settled, suddenly become elusive once again. You can feel disappointment and suspicion, that this thing which should have been true always and forever has changed, or you can let yourself be curious, and follow after it down a different path. It may all at last make sense once more, only to yet again appear fragmented and destroyed. It may not make sense at all except in hindsight. It will probably not all fit in our perspective this side of death itself, but this is the journey we are called to.

So it is that the women who came to Christ’s tomb found it empty. The empty tomb had its own reality to reveal, a baffling revelation, an unnameable experience. Some of the other disciples would not believe it until they saw it themselves, but found that the women’s account had been true all along. The empty tomb could be a disappointment. The empty tomb must be the path to life. That is something that we may experience, by the experiences shared by people we have never met, now long dead themselves. It is something we can never, fully, know. Beyond measure and explanation, so foolishly we place our hope in the absence of something, someone we never met while he was alive.

All of this is in God, as Christ is in God. May we meet Christ in one another. May we yearn across the chasm. May we find Christ in the empty tomb. Amen.