Itinerant in This Place
A follow-up to “The Kingdom Within”
I exist inside the tragic dimension with all my fellow human souls. And Christianity is part of the social fabric. As are other traditions that I will also explore in the coming months here at Notes from the Circus. I come in peace. But I’m not staying the night.
I want to say that clearly at the outset, because some of my readers heard “The Kingdom Within” as a step toward conversion. I understand why. The piece was warm. It was genuinely moved. It did not take the Hitchens posture — the piece was not an autopsy. It was something closer to a letter of bewildered respect from an unexpected visitor. And some readers, I think, heard the warmth and concluded I was finding my way to the door.
I am not finding my way to the door. I am standing outside it, in the cold, looking through the window, finding the interior more interesting than I expected, and remaining outside.
That is a specific position. It deserves a specific name. I am itinerant in this place.
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The misreading I most want to address is not the one about conversion. It is a subtler one — and I noticed it in some of the responses that were most enthusiastic, which made it harder to name.
Some readers heard the piece as an endorsement of the turn away from intellect. The embodied life. The monkey mind set aside. The bones and sinews and living truth. The general gesture toward presence and away from analysis. And I want to be careful here, because I have genuine respect for that territory — the contemplative tradition is where I found what Harris pointed me toward, and it changed my life in ways I will not minimize. But that is not what I was saying. And I think the conflation of what I was saying with that gesture is itself a version of the problem I was diagnosing.
The kingdom within is not the body overruling the mind. It is not the liberation of the unreflective self from the tyranny of analysis. Jesus was not telling his listeners to stop thinking. He was telling them to stop performing. Those are not the same thing. The Pharisees he kept turning his attention toward were not guilty of excessive intellectualism. They were guilty of substituting the performance of righteousness for its actual practice — of wearing the kingdom as a costume rather than inhabiting it as an orientation.
The contemplative practice that saved my life did not make me less of a thinker. It made me a better one, because it cleared the residue — the anxiety, the compulsion, the ego-protective noise — that was sitting between my thinking and the thing I was trying to think about. Meditation is not the suspension of analysis. It is the precondition for analysis that isn’t secretly in service of something else.
So when I say the kingdom is within, I am not giving anyone permission to stop using their mind. I am saying the mind needs to be pointed in a direction, and that direction is not backward toward the defense of inherited structures. It is forward. Toward what is not yet. Toward the open question.
