We’re Living in the Rubble of Former Beliefs
The collapse of cosmic meaning is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of coherence.
We try to fill the gap with productivity, intensity, or spiritual self-help, but nothing fully settles. Even our attempts at inner work often feel strangely unsupported, like trying to build a sanctuary on a foundation that keeps shifting.
This reflection grows out of Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within. Cynthia Bourgeault teaches what it means to reclaim interior coherence in a culture that has forgotten how to see the whole. She weaves together insights from Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self. Helminski describes our moment with unusual clarity. He says that we are living in the rubble of former beliefs. This piece is my attempt to walk through that rubble and look for what is still alive, still trustworthy, and still capable of guiding us home.
The Collapse Happened Quietly
Helminski is not being nostalgic. He is not longing for medieval certainty or returning to old systems. He is pointing to something more essential. For most of human history, people assumed the world was meaningful at its core. They disagreed about many things. They argued about the nature of God, virtue, and truth. Yet beneath those disagreements was a shared intuition. Life aimed somewhere. Existence rested on something unified, intelligent, and benevolent.
Over time that center dissolved. The shift did not happen through one dramatic event. It was slow, quiet, and cumulative.
Science did not cause it by itself.
Modernity did not cause it by itself.
Religion did not cause it either.
Meaning eroded through the steady influence of a worldview that treated the universe as accidental, fragmented, and indifferent. It told us to trust only what can be measured. It told us that consciousness is an anomaly. It told us that meaning is subjective. It told us that the universe is a machine without an interior.
We adjusted to this view of reality. The soul never fully accepted it.
Now we are living inside a culture that assumes the world is hollow at the center. Human beings were not designed for that assumption. Something in us begins to starve.
This is the rubble.
It is the collapse of coherence, not the collapse of religion.
Why Life Feels Heavy When the Center Disappears
When a culture no longer believes in a meaningful order, all the weight shifts onto the individual psyche.
Instead of being held by a larger coherence, we feel responsible for creating meaning from scratch. We are told to create our own identity, invent our own purpose, define our own truth, and stabilize our own existence. The ego is not built for this burden. It is a survival mechanism. It cannot carry the responsibility of holding the universe together.
So the psyche begins to strain.
We overthink everything.
We personalize everything.
We chase intensity in order to feel alive.
We try to stabilize ourselves through productivity.
We live without a unifying thread.
Life becomes heavier because we no longer trust that anything larger is holding us.
The problem is not that human beings lost faith in God.
The problem is that we lost faith in meaning.
The Inner Tradition Starts With a Different Premise
The inner tradition begins with a different foundation. It does not assume that reality is meaningless. It begins with the opposite truth. Reality is meaningful at its core. The universe is coherent. The whole precedes the parts.
Meaning is not something we construct with our minds. Meaning is something we discover ourselves participating in. It is already here. We do not invent it. We align with it.
This is not a belief system. It is an observation. The moment the mind quiets, even for a few seconds, the world stops feeling accidental. A subtle rhythm becomes noticeable. A quiet intelligence reveals itself within the fabric of experience.
Presence reveals coherence.
Not through argument.
Through perception.
As presence deepens, coherence becomes obvious. Cynthia often describes presence as the organ of spiritual perception. Without presence, the world appears random. With presence, the unity becomes unmistakable.
We Do Not Need the Old Scaffolding. We Need the Old Center.
People sometimes believe the solution is to restore old belief structures. But the scaffolding is not what we lost. The center is what we lost.
The scaffolding was simply an attempt to describe the center. When the scaffolding collapsed, the center did not disappear. We simply lost the ability to sense it.
Presence restores that connection.
Presence reorients you toward the unified field beneath your thoughts and roles.
Presence gives you back the sense that your life is held, wanted, and part of a larger unfolding.
This does not require returning to old worldviews.
It does not require adopting new dogma.
It does not even require naming the center.
It simply requires attention.
When attention drops into the body, into breath, into awareness itself, the deeper coherence reveals itself. The soul recognizes it instantly. The mind recognizes it more slowly.
A New Way to Live in the Aftermath
Most people try to escape the rubble rather than understand it. They numb themselves. They optimize themselves. They express trauma as identity. They chase emotional highs. They turn spirituality into self-maintenance.
The rubble itself is not the problem. It is the ground where illusions have fallen away. It is the place where borrowed beliefs cracked open. It is the clearing where something real can finally emerge.
The invitation is not to rebuild what has collapsed.
The invitation is to reclaim the coherence that never left.
The path back is not dramatic.
It is ordinary.
It is quiet.
It is presence.
Moment by moment.
Breath by breath.
Returning to the inner seat where the world begins to make sense. Not because you have solved anything. Because you have stopped standing outside your own life.
Coherence Returns When You Stop Manufacturing Meaning
Meaning is not a psychological product.
It is a participation.
Meaning arises when the small self stops trying to architect reality. Meaning arises when awareness begins to sense the deeper pattern that already exists. Presence connects you to the Whole that has always been carrying you.
When the Whole becomes real again in your awareness and in your breath, the rubble stops looking like a failure. It becomes a threshold. It becomes the end of inherited meaning and the beginning of recognition.
Coherence has always been here.
Presence gives you eyes to see it again.
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Long ago, decades, I read a book titled "Ascent to God: Faith as Art, Risk and Humor." The author talked about how the enter of our faith must be reclaimed periodically through life. What we understand when we are a child doesn't hold and we must free fall until we find our new center. This process necessarily repeats - if we are to grow. I like your explanation analogy. The center doesn't change -but our scaffolding has to be rebuilt from time to time.
🙏🏼 Thank you for sharing your thoughts — I strongly resonate with much of what you said. I’ve come to believe that Homo sapiens, particularly our egoic mind, represents a kind of failed experiment on the part of Nature or the Creator. At the same time, I’ve found that it’s precisely when the mind becomes most quiet that we experience true contentment, harmony, and peace. 🪷