The Religious Development of tantaman.com

A Timeline of the Arc from Diagnosis to Ground

Two threads run through this blog. One is intellectual: the essays, the genealogies, the theological arguments. The other is experiential: the stories, the felt texture of captivity and release, the first-person encounters with what the essays can only describe. Neither thread alone tells the whole story. The intellectual thread without the experiential is theology. The experiential without the intellectual is testimony. Braided together, they trace a single arc: from skepticism through analysis to recognition, from recognition to truth, from truth to the cessation of will.

Phase 0: The Question Takes Shape (Late 2025)

Asking "What's Killing Us?"

The blog begins not from theology but from systems analysis. The entry point is a deceptively secular question: why is modernity producing epidemic depression, anxiety, and declining fertility? The answer doesn't stay secular for long.

In "Materialism Is Killing You" (Dec 2025), the frame is still rationalist — arguing against materialism on its own empirical terms:

"You pride yourself on not being fooled. You rejected the superstitions your ancestors believed. You follow the evidence. You think in terms of mechanisms, incentives, selection pressures. You are a rationalist. Good. Let's be rational. Let's examine, with the same skepticism you apply to religion, the framework you've adopted in its place."

— Materialism Is Killing You

The argument is deliberately pitched to the secular reader: meaning isn't a luxury or an illusion — it's functional. Populations that lose it show measurable collapse. The essay ends with a test:

"If materialism is correct and meaning is merely a subjective illusion with no functional importance, then populations that fully internalize this view should do at least as well as populations that don't… Look around. Which outcome do you observe?"

The Felt Diagnosis

But what does the collapse feel like from inside? "The Exhaustion That Cannot Rest" (Jan 2026) maps it — not as theory but as phenomenology. Three poisons (the cult of the wound, inherited guilt, endless self-optimization) combine into a cage with no exit:

"This is the riddle I place before you: a weariness that forbids rest. A depletion that demands more. A sickness that has made recovery itself into a symptom of the disease."

— The Exhaustion That Cannot Rest

The essay's most chilling insight is that the cage is interior — each poison blocks the exit the others leave open:

"The traumatized cannot heal — but they can work on healing. The guilty cannot be absolved — but they can do the work. The achiever cannot stop — but trauma and guilt give them infinite material. Each poison is the antidote to the others' side effects, while amplifying their primary toxicity."

Pivot point: The question of meaning, framed empirically and felt experientially, forces the blog toward metaphysics. If meaning is functional and its absence is killing us, what grounds it? This is where the genealogical project begins.

Phase 1: Genealogy — Tracing the Christian Operating System (Dec 2025)

"We Are Not Rid of God"

Before any constructive religious project, the blog undertakes a massive genealogical excavation: how did we get here? The central insight, drawn from Nietzsche and Foucault, is that secularism didn't escape Christianity — it inherited Christianity's structure while discarding its theology.

"The Husk of God: Why Atheists Think in Christian" (Dec 2025) establishes the framework:

"Most atheists believe they have escaped Christianity. They no longer pray, no longer attend services, no longer believe in resurrection or eternal life. They have rejected the supernatural and embraced reason. They are free. Or so they think."

— The Husk of God

The essay shows that Western consciousness retains Christian architecture — linear history, victim-identification, the confessing self, eschatological hope — even after the theology has been abandoned:

"Nietzsche understood this with brutal clarity… His argument was simple: You can kill God, but you cannot kill the Christian moral system that came with Him."

Foucault's contribution deepens the diagnosis. Christianity didn't just give the West beliefs — it gave the West a new kind of self:

"Before Christianity, ancient cultures did not have the same concept of an inner life that must be constantly examined, confessed, and purified. Christianity invented: the idea of an inner self that must be watched, the practice of confession… the sense that we have 'true feelings' buried deep inside."

Key essays in this phase:

• The Husk of God — secular categories as Christian residue
• Monotheism to Now — how "one God" became "one truth" became atomized individualism
• Why Marxism Is Impossible Without Christian Eschatology — Marxism as a Christian heresy
• Monstrous Doubles — Girard on why opposing movements mirror what they oppose
• From Galilee to Empire — the institutional capture of Christianity itself

The Girardian Thread

René Girard becomes a recurring lens. "Monstrous Doubles" (Dec 2025) introduces mimetic theory — that desire is borrowed, not spontaneous — and applies it to the Christianity-Marxism relationship:

"Girard's foundational insight… is that human desire is not spontaneous but mediated. We do not simply want objects because they satisfy some pre-existing need. We want what others want, because they want it."

— Monstrous Doubles

This isn't just academic. The Girardian lens will later become central to understanding why institutions capture everything — and why the blog's final position requires escaping mimetic rivalry entirely.

Phase 2: The Critique of Deconstruction (Jan 2026)

Turning the Weapon on the Wielders

Having traced the Christian inheritance through secularism, the blog pivots to confront deconstruction itself. This is the anti-Foucault move — using the same genealogical method to expose the deconstructors as captured by the very dynamics they claim to diagnose.

"The Physicians of Decay" (Jan 2026), written in Nietzschean aphoristic style, is the sharpest expression:

"I called for the revaluation of all values. They delivered the dissolution of all values and called it the same thing. But dissolution is not revaluation. Destruction is not creation. The void is not the Ubermensch. I wanted philosophers who could build. I got professors who could only burn."

— The Physicians of Decay

The key insight is that deconstruction serves the system it claims to oppose:

"The deconstructed self is the ideal consumer, the perfect subject, the compliant citizen. The philosophers think they are radical. They are servants. They do the system's work by producing the kind of human the system requires."

"The Fence You Cannot See" (Jan 2026) deepens this by applying Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment to the deconstructive project itself:

"The deconstructionist who tears down every standard, every norm, every claim to truth, does not thereby escape the will to power. She merely exercises it through negation, defining herself as the arbiter of what is 'merely constructed' and therefore dismissable."

— The Fence You Cannot See

The structures the deconstructors tore down turn out to have been load-bearing:

"The postmodernists flipped over the tables of a historic, painstakingly constructed civilization, expecting to find only power and domination underneath. Instead, they found the outlines of reality itself. The structures were not arbitrary; they were load-bearing. Tear them down, and you do not get a blank slate on which to write utopia. You get rubble."

Pivot point: The blog has now critiqued both naive tradition and its deconstruction. The space is cleared for a third position — faith that has passed through the fire.

Phase 3: The Return — and The Table (Jan 2026)

Post-Critical Faith

"The Return" (Jan 2026) is the hinge of the entire project. It names the dialectical arc explicitly:

"This is the arc: Thesis: naive faith, holding the transcendent without understanding it. Antithesis: critique, dissolving the transcendent, calling dissolution liberation. Synthesis: faith that has passed through the fire."

— The Return

The synthesis is not regression to pre-critical innocence:

"The synthesis is not the thesis. We do not return to pre-critical innocence. That garden is closed. But we return to the substance of what was held — the transcendent ground, the good and evil, the covenant, the yes-saying to life — now knowing why it matters."

The essay's most radical claim: faith is not the conclusion of an argument but the precondition of reasoning:

"Faith does not come after reason establishes its credentials. Faith is what makes reason possible. Without trust, reason has no ground to stand on. It saws and saws until it saws through itself."

But the return isn't to belief as propositions. It's to practice — the body carrying what the mind cannot hold:

"The Jews survived three thousand years of cycles… They kept Shabbat even when they weren't sure why. They circumcised their sons even through pogroms. They read the Torah even in the camps. The practice carried the substance when the belief faltered. You can deconstruct a doctrine. It is harder to deconstruct a genuflection."

The Material Vision

Where "The Return" declares the principle, "The Table" (Jan 2026) gives it flesh. Written in prophetic cadence, it lays out the full material vision of what the return looks like in practice — the table as the social form that escapes the engine of capture:

"The new thing does not win by defeating the old. It wins by making the old irrelevant. By walking out of the colosseum while the crowd still screams."

— The Table

The essay names the Girardian trap at the level of desire — and identifies what breaks it:

"The bread on the table is divided and becomes less. Each mouth means less for other mouths. The presence at the table is shared and becomes more. Each soul means more for other souls. Learn to want the second kind of thing. Or remain forever hungry fighting over crumbs."

And it insists on now — not after the revolution, not after the election, not after the system changes:

"The table is set now. The bread is here now. The community is possible now. Not after we win the election. Not after we defeat the fascists or the communists or whatever name we give the enemy this decade. Now."

The essay closes with a complete Rule — practices for fasting, Sabbath, confession, vows, shared meals — the infrastructure of the return made concrete.

Phase 4: Principalities and Powers (Jan 2026)

The Structural Turn to Spiritual Warfare

Having returned to faith, the blog immediately confronts the question: how do you fight systems that capture everything? The answer comes from an unexpected source — Paul's letter to the Ephesians, read not as superstition but as structural analysis.

"Principalities and Powers" (Jan 2026) is the essay where the blog's political analysis fuses with its theological commitments:

"Paul is telling the early church: your enemy is not Nero. Kill Nero and another Nero appears. Your enemy is not the centurion or the tax collector or the provincial governor. These are flesh and blood, and flesh and blood is not your war. Your war is against the principality that produces endless Neros."

— Principalities and Powers

The critical move is showing that Foucault's diagnosis of structural power was anticipated by Paul — but that Paul had something Foucault lacked:

"Foucault rediscovered this. His account of disciplinary power, of biopower, of governmentality — this is a secular translation of Paul's principalities… But Foucault offered only diagnosis, not cure. He could name the principalities but he had no armor of God. He had no alternative formation. He had no parallel polis."

"The Economy of Refusal" (Jan 2026) extends this into ecclesiology — the church not as a set of beliefs but as the material infrastructure that makes resistance possible:

"You cannot resist alone. This is the first and most important thing to understand about the principalities… An individual who refuses — who declines the ritual, who will not confess, who maintains the inner room against all pressure — will simply be destroyed. Fired, deplatformed, unpersoned. And then the principality continues, having lost nothing."

— The Economy of Refusal

The church's function is redefined:

"The church as community. The church as alternative economy. The church as mutual aid society, employment network, safety net, place to stand… This is the function of the church in the war against principalities: to create the infrastructure of refusal."

Phase 5: Know Thyself — Comparative Psychology of the Self (Dec 2025)

Eight Traditions, One Question

Running parallel to the political-theological arc is a massive comparative study of self-knowledge across traditions. The "Know Thyself" series (Dec 2025) traces how Greek, Christian, Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Gurdjieffian, Kierkegaardian, and Eckhartian psychologies each answer "who am I?" differently — and how your answer to that question determines your entire form of life.

The series begins with a genealogical insight about the modern self:

"We moderns inherit a particular way of being selves. We assume that truth lives inside us — that authenticity means excavating our hidden desires, that mental health requires surfacing buried traumas… This interior orientation feels natural — like simply being human. But it is not. It was invented."

— Know Thyself: Greek vs Christian

The comparative framework surfaces a key realization: different traditions locate the problem in different places, so they prescribe different practices. The modern therapeutic model (derived from Augustine) assumes hidden desires are the problem. Buddhism dissolves the self entirely. Gurdjieff says you don't have a self yet — you must build one. And Eckhart...

Pivot point: Eckhart emerges from the comparative study as the figure who cuts beneath all others:

"Man's last and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God."

This is the moment when mysticism enters the blog not as an add-on but as the resolution the comparative study has been building toward.

Phase 6: The Body as Ground (Jan 2026)

Preparing the Substrate

Between the intellectual return to practice and the mystical turn, a critical bridge: "The Body as Ground" (Jan 2026). The essay argues that no spiritual project can succeed on a body colonized by industrial conditions — that the ancients didn't need a philosophy of the body because they had bodies that functioned:

"The modern person inherits a body actively disordered by industrial and post-industrial conditions. Not merely neglected — colonized. Hyperpalatable food engineered to override satiety signals. Work that atrophies muscle while exhausting the nervous system. Light environments that scramble circadian architecture."

— The Body as Ground

The essay recovers the integration that modern Christianity abandoned:

"Jewish law regulates food, sex, rest, and ritual purity as inseparable from covenant faithfulness. The Rule of St. Benedict choreographs sleep, labor, prayer, and meals as a unified daily order… The body was always already spiritual; the spiritual was always already embodied."

The critical distinction: this is not wellness optimization. It is bodily discipline as preparation for what exceeds the body — the ordering of the substrate so that spiritual practice has somewhere to land:

"The body is the temple. Not the god worshipped within it, but the sacred space where worship becomes possible. A temple with a collapsed roof cannot host the presence it was built to contain."

Pivot point: The body must be reclaimed before the mystical journey can begin. This bridges the political-communal project (The Table, Principalities) with the interior project (Eckhart, the Ground).

Phase 7: Mysticism — Eckhart and the Ground (Dec 2025 – Feb 2026)

"I Pray God to Rid Me of God"

Meister Eckhart becomes the blog's central theological figure — not Augustine, not Aquinas, not Calvin. Eckhart, the 14th-century Dominican who was condemned for heresy because he took the interior journey to its limit.

The "Know Thyself" series introduces him:

"There is something in the soul so closely akin to God that it is already one with Him and need never be united to Him… This something is so intimately one with God that it is already one with Him in unity, not merely in union."

— Know Thyself: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart

Where Augustine probes desires and confesses them, Eckhart releases them:

"Augustine would have you confess your desires to purify them. Eckhart would have you release them entirely — not by understanding them but by letting them go."

"Mystical Meaning" (Feb 2026) marks the deepest integration of Eckhart into the blog's framework. Here, information theory and mysticism converge. Meaning is shown to be a boundary phenomenon — it lives at interfaces between systems. Eckhart's "Ground" is what's there when the boundaries dissolve:

"Eckhart's central teaching was about what happens when all distinctions collapse. He called it the Grunt — the Ground — and he described it as the place where the soul and God are one, prior to any relationship, any distinction, any meaning… His answer was not 'nothing.' It was something he struggled to name — the 'desert of the Godhead,' the 'silent stillness,' a reality so prior to distinction that even calling it 'God' was already too much."

— Mystical Meaning

The essay also recovers prayer from its caricature:

"Dawkins is attacking the outer shell of religion from the outside. Eckhart attacked the same shell from the inside, and hit it harder… What Eckhart means by prayer is almost the opposite of conversation. It's silence. The systematic stripping away of images, concepts, words, expectations — everything you might 'talk to.'"

Eckhart also redeems detachment from Buddhist or Stoic connotations:

"Not withdrawal from the world, not numbness, not indifference… It means engaging fully in life while knowing that the meaning you're swimming in is something you are participating in creating, not something imposed on you from outside."

Phase 8: The Kingdom Within — Recovering Pre-Pauline Jesus (Dec 2025)

The Fork in the Road

A critical parallel thread runs through the blog's chats and essays: the distinction between Jesus's teaching and Paul's theology. This isn't anti-Christian polemic — it's an attempt to recover what was lost when Christianity became Christology.

"Know Thyself: The Kingdom Within" (Dec 2025) identifies the fork:

"Later Christianity interpreted the kingdom primarily as a future event — the end of the world, the Second Coming, the final judgment. This eschatological reading supports an institutional church: the church manages salvation between Jesus's departure and his return. But many of Jesus's sayings suggest the kingdom is already present."

— The Kingdom Within

The Gospel of Thomas becomes a key text:

"'The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.' This is not the psychology of sin and confession. It is the psychology of blindness and seeing."

The essay recovers an older Christianity beneath the institutional layers:

"This tradition teaches that the kingdom is within, that the divine spark cannot be extinguished, that self-knowledge means recognizing your true nature as image of God, that transformation comes through practice… This is Christianity too — perhaps the older Christianity."

Pivot point: The blog is now working with a specific reconstruction: Jesus as structural critic, Eckhart as the thinker who recovered Jesus's interiority centuries later, and Paul as the (sincere, necessary, but structurally transformative) architect of the institutional turn.

Phase 9: The Encounter — What Transformation Requires (Feb 2026)

"What If the Thing You're Protecting Yourself From Is the Only Thing That Can Save You?"

Before the arc can move from intellectual recognition to lived experience, a transitional essay names the obstacle: we have lost the capacity for encounter — for being genuinely changed by what exceeds us.

"What If the Thing You're Protecting Yourself From Is the Only Thing That Can Save You?" (Feb 2026) diagnoses a civilization that has insulated itself from the very thing it needs:

"The contemporary world is structured, at nearly every level, to prevent this from happening. Social media feeds you your own preferences back in an accelerating loop. Therapy, in its debased popular form, teaches you to establish boundaries against anything that would disrupt your equilibrium. The market transforms every relationship into a transaction where both parties retain full sovereignty."

— What If the Thing You're Protecting...

The essay recovers three lost arts — attention (Weil's "rarest form of generosity"), commitment (the voluntary narrowing that makes depth possible), and the proper relationship to suffering — and names why none of them can be implemented:

"You can't engineer encounter. You can't manufacture the sacred. You can't program transformation. These things happen — they have always happened — in the spaces the culture hasn't yet managed to colonize."

Pivot point: The intellectual arc has reached its limit. The blog has mapped the cage, critiqued the critics, returned to faith, identified the Ground, and named what encounter requires. But theory cannot deliver what only experience can. The thread passes from the essays to the stories.

Phase 10: The Narrative Turn — Will, Presence, Ground (Feb 2026)

The Stories That Show What the Essays Describe

Here the experiential thread takes the lead. Three stories demonstrate — not argue, demonstrate — what the theoretical arc has been pointing toward. They are not illustrations of the theology. They are its evidence.

"The Lamb" — Cessation of Will

"The Lamb" (Feb 2026) is the narrative heart of the entire project. A man spends three years pursuing relentless self-improvement — cold showers, deadlifts, men's groups, "the sacred masculine" — optimizing himself into what he calls "a magnificent emergency." Then, on a Tuesday morning, sitting on a mattress in a bare apartment, the project manager in his head simply stops:

"Not stopped meditating. Not stopped in the way I'd 'stopped' before… I just stopped. The way a machine stops when you pull the plug. Not a decision. An absence of decision. The deciding part of me — the foreman, the project manager, the guy with the clipboard who turns every breath into a rep and every silence into a set — that part went quiet. Not quiet like it was resting. Quiet like it was gone."

— The Lamb

What he finds beneath is not something he built:

"Something that was there before all of that. Before the self-improvement. Before the marriage. Before the gym. Before the name my parents gave me. Before the name."

The story names the paradox the essays can only gesture at: every attempt to reach the Ground is the thing that prevents reaching it. The trying is the wall. The effort is the obstacle. And the Ground was always already there:

"The ground was always there. You are standing on it right now. You have never not been standing on it. Every cage you've been in — the consumer cage, the optimizer cage, the Tyler cage — was built on top of it and the ground held the weight of every cage without complaint."

"The Lamb, Part II" — The Ground Calls Forward

But the Ground doesn't let you stay comfortable. "The Lamb, Part II" (Feb 2026) deepens the story: the same man, now working data entry in quiet anonymity, discovers his company is falsifying freight insurance classifications. The Ground — the same presence that opened beneath him in a Kroger produce section — strips away the comfortable ignorance that would let him look away:

"The ground just made it impossible to not see. That's all it did. It removed the thing that lets you not see. The comfortable film. The soft buffer between you and the way things actually are."

— The Lamb, Part II

He reports. He loses everything — the job, the apartment, the quiet life. Dennis is transferred, not fired. The system absorbs his complaint. Nothing changes except him. The Ground does not reward:

"The ground is not a reward system. The ground does not operate on exchange… But here is what I know, in the room in Reseda, with the Korean dramas humming through the wall: The ground did not crack."

This is the Lamb: not the one who walks to slaughter because it is good, but because the Ground has shown him something and once the Ground shows you something, you cannot un-see it.

"Nine Months, Two Men" — Will vs. Presence in Ordinary Life

"Nine Months, Two Men" (Feb 2026) brings the same dynamic into the domestic register — no mystical experience, no crisis of conscience, just nine months of pregnancy after a traumatic first delivery. Same man, same fear, two responses.

The first man manages — researching mortality statistics, building spreadsheets, planning a funeral while his wife is still alive:

"He's been so busy rehearsing her death that he's missed her life. Six months of her life. Six months of his own."

— Nine Months, Two Men

The second man meets — feels the fear, names it, shares it, and stays in the room:

"The difference — the only difference — is that the fear has nowhere to metastasize. He felt it, named it, shared it. It remains itself. It doesn't become insomnia or distance or a spreadsheet or a secret."

The epilogue names what the theology argues:

"This isn't a story about meditation or therapy or any particular technique… It's about a more fundamental orientation: whether you meet experience directly or through the buffer of management."

Both men love their daughter. Both weep when she is born. But one was there for all nine months, and one was somewhere else entirely. The difference is practice.

Pivot point: The stories have shown what the theology means. Will is the cage. The Ground holds. Presence — not management, not optimization, not even faith-as-belief — is how you inhabit your own life. The arc now moves to its final intellectual movements before the culminating experience.

Phase 11: Eschatology — The Unengineerable Rupture (Feb 2026)

"A Known Revolution Is a Captured Revolution"

The eschatological turn represents the blog's most sophisticated theological work. Two major essays appear on the same day (Feb 21, 2026):

"The Unengineerable Rupture" reads biblical eschatology not as prediction but as structural wisdom about the limits of human engineering:

"Eschatology is not a religious peculiarity. It is the structure of hope — the way any community imagines the relationship between the suffering of the present and the possibility of redemption. To have an eschatology is to believe that the way things are is not the way things must remain."

— The Unengineerable Rupture

The central insight is that Jesus's refusal to give a schedule is not evasion but epistemological fortress:

"'About that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.' This is not epistemic humility. It is an epistemological fortress built around the insight that matters most. The genuine rupture — the real interruption of the cycle of capture — cannot be known in advance because the moment it is known, scheduled, systematized, it has been absorbed into the operating system."

The failed prediction of the Second Coming becomes the teaching:

"The Second Coming 'failed' as a temporal prediction and succeeded as a structural insight. The event that cannot be scheduled, cannot be predicted, cannot be captured by any system that claims to await it — this is the event that every system needs and no system can produce. The non-arrival does not disprove the doctrine. The non-arrival is the doctrine."

"The West Is Trapped in a Religious Psychodrama" (Feb 2026) applies the eschatological framework to geopolitics, showing how three Abrahamic civilizations are locked in mimetic rivalry around incompatible end-times narratives:

"It does not matter whether the prophecies are true. What matters is that the people with the most power and the most weapons believe they are — or find it useful to act as though they do."

— The West Is Trapped

The Girardian scapegoat mechanism returns at civilizational scale — and the blog identifies the designated scapegoat in the current cycle.

Phase 12: The Synthesis — Desire, Engine, Table (Feb 2026)

"The Hand That Does Not Grasp"

"The Open Hand: On Desire, the Engine, and the Table" (Feb 21, 2026) is the culminating essay. It draws every thread together — Girard, Eckhart, institutional capture, eschatology, the principalities — into a single integrated vision.

The engine is the mechanism of institutional capture itself:

"Every act of institutional capture described in the previous essay shares a common fuel: will. Someone decides to build a system. Someone decides to administer it. Someone decides to reform it. Someone decides to overthrow it. Each of these is a project — an assertion of human agency aimed at an engineered outcome. And each is captured, because will is the operating system's native language."

— The Open Hand

The essay names what every other thinker missed:

"Marx understood this about capitalism. He did not understand it about revolution. Foucault understood this about every institution he analyzed. He did not understand it about the institution of critique."

Eckhart's Gelassenheit is identified as the posture that does not feed the engine:

"Gelassenheit is not detachment. Detachment is a decision: I will not grasp. Decisions are acts of will. Acts of will feed the engine. Eckhart knows this… The renunciation is so thorough that even the renouncing subject has been released."

The miracles of Jesus are read as evidence that the "outside" is real — not metaphor, not institutional credential, but breaking-through:

"Feeding breaks economic capture… Healing breaks social capture… Resurrection breaks existential capture — the deepest and final layer. Death is the system's ultimate enforcement mechanism."

And the table — the Eucharist stripped to its irreducible simplicity — is the social form:

"Not: build this. Not: fund this. Not: scale this. Not: develop a strategic plan for this. Just: do this. Repeat the gesture. Bread, wine, the shared meal, the open hand."

The essay closes with its complete architecture:

"The table without the diagnosis is just church — one more institution susceptible to capture. The diagnosis without the table is just critical theory. The posture without the evidence is just mysticism. The evidence without the posture is just religion. Together, they form something that has no adequate name in the modern vocabulary."

And the name it does give:

"Faith. Not belief in propositions. Not confidence in a timeline. Not membership in an institution that claims to administer the sacred. Faith as what the structural analysis yields when it is pushed to its own limit — the recognition that the engine is real, that no act of will can escape it, that the outside is real, that it cannot be produced, and that the only coherent response is the open hand."

Phase 13: Arrival — Wanting Without Willing (Feb 2026)

The Arc Completes in Experience

The intellectual synthesis could be the end. But the blog's deepest commitment — that faith is not theory but encounter — demands that the arc complete not in argument but in experience.

"Wanting Without Willing" (Feb 2026) opens with a first-person report:

"I experienced the cessation of the will while wishing for our newborn daughter to be soothed and stop crying. I saw the self dissolve. It was as if a glass was removed from the one and reality. I could still want but wanting was without will. All the machinations of the self were gone and proven draining and illusory."

— Wanting Without Willing

Not in a monastery. Not in meditation. While soothing a crying infant.

The essay then does what the blog has been doing all along — takes the experience and reads it through every tradition that has described it. Eckhart's Gelassenheit: "In the breaking-through, when I come to be free of will, of myself and of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all created things." Simone Weil's gravity and grace: "Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void." The Bhagavad Gita's nishkama karma: "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions." Lao Tzu's wu wei: "The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone." The Cloud of Unknowing: "You will seem to know nothing and to feel nothing except a naked intent toward God in the depths of your being." Krishnamurti: "When you recognize that every movement of the mind is merely a form of strengthening the self, when you observe it, see it, when you are completely aware of it in action — then you will see that the mind, being utterly still, has no power of creating." The Sufi tradition of fana and baqa: "Annihilation is the negation of something that never truly was."

Every tradition names the same thing. The will ceases. The self dissolves. What remains is not nothing but everything that actually is.

This is where the arc arrives: not at a theology, not at a position paper, not at a system — but at the experience the entire project has been circling. The man in the Kroger holding a cantaloupe. The second man with his hand on his wife's belly. The hand that does not grasp. The will that ceases while the wanting continues. The glass removed between the one and reality.

The Ground was always there.

The Arc at a Glance

The Theological Position Arrived At

The blog arrives at a position with no clean denominational label. It is:

• Post-critical — it has passed through Nietzsche, Foucault, Girard, and the deconstructors, and come out the other side
• Mystical — Eckhart's apophatic tradition over Augustine's confessional tradition
• Anti-institutional — not against community, but against the capture engine that turns every community into an institution
• Eschatologically open — the real interruption cannot be scheduled, predicted, or engineered
• Eucharistic — the irreducible social form is the table, not the church
• Pre-Pauline in sympathy — recovering the Jesus of the kingdom-within over the Christ of soteriological transaction
• Embodied — the body is the ground of spiritual life, not its enemy or its afterthought
• Experientially confirmed — the arc does not end in argument but in the cessation of will, experienced firsthand

Its final gesture is not a system but an invocation:

"The tradition tells us that at a certain meal, the bread was broken and the guest was recognized, and in the moment of recognition he vanished. This is the complete icon of what is offered here: presence that arrives unbidden, is recognized in the breaking, and cannot be held — only received again, at the next table, with open hands."