We’re stirred by mismatching urges: one nudging us to follow our clarity till we experience Unity, the other monitoring the degree to which our sounding will be tolerated. It’s enough to make a pilgrim schizophrenic: feel it all, but keep it to yourself. It breeds a painful tension that no one seems able to escape. On the one hand, we’re born with a trust in the interior life that it will serve as a threshold to the Universal Ground of Being. On the other hand, we’re taught to be skeptical of a brutal world overrun by those afraid of the power of truth. At our worst, our communities are so frightened by the energy of truth that we ostracize, exile, or harm the pilgrim who shares it, as with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s important to remember that, on any given day, we are both: the seeker and the one who pushes the seeker away.

For most of us, this leads to a tense state of living in which the modern pilgrim in search of Unity is open internally and guarded externally, until we become, by turns, an inlet to nature and a fortress to others. Perhaps this is what led Goethe to remark: “Tell a wise person or else keep silent.”

Today, the plight of the spiritual seeker often involves a tandem effort: socially closeting one’s self like a spy, afraid of being caught and ostracized by our virtuous brothers and sisters, while privately opening our most private self to the Eternities, hoping to catch a mist of light that might anoint our soul. In this way, we all develop secret identities and become hidden heroes in our own comics. Why else are the people we work with so different when we chance upon them in the world?

But the real danger of skepticism is the erosion of trust. Not only in what we hear, but slowly, eroding back into the ground of our own perception until we can’t trust what we see, until we ourselves stop living clearly, until we become unreliable in our own interpretation of what we experience.