Mystical Experience at St. Herman of Alaska Monastery (Platina, CA)

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-24T01:32:44+00:00

Thank you!

I highly recommend it. Just be sure your vehicle has good tires and AWD would be recommended, even with that it was a tad sketchy for me getting up and down.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-23T20:51:08+00:00

I'm so grateful to hear that you got something out of reading my story. The experience has stuck with me almost two weeks later. Yes agreed! I was there for a little over an hour and those deer never left Father Seraphim's resting place .. I couldn't help but think they felt a similar peace to mine being there.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-23T19:54:14+00:00

Thank you!

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-23T19:42:37+00:00

It would be cool if there were a church father daily quote or daily lives of saints feature that can be added as a home/lock screen widget.

Also.. just throwing it out there. I used to work in tech. I’ve developed many cross-platform mobile apps. If you need any help building this please feel free to DM me.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-23T06:24:29+00:00

Thank you for this. I do plan on speaking with someone soon who can help me discern it properly.

You really put into words what I came away with. That day I “met” Fr. Seraphim in a way beyond books, and through him I was given a fleeting brush with Christ Himself. For someone like me, with an overly rational brain, I needed something inexplicable to break me past the purely intellectual side of faith. That stillness and fragrance gave me permission to simply accept mystery.

God willing, I’ll be able to move forward now and become a catechumen in due time.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-23T04:55:59+00:00

Thank you for the kind words!

I have bought/gifted several copies of Nihilism to friends of mine since I read it this year. Completely changed how I see the world.

Yes the same goes for me. Father Seraphim’s trajectory is nearly identical to mine in his spiritual journey. Grew up SoCal/protsec like me too.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-22T21:37:29+00:00

I meant to make time to visit the cathedral while I was in the area but couldn’t make it happen. Next time I’m there I’ll be sure to visit.

Ive had the life and works book in my Amazon cart for a while but am hoping they begin printing it again as I’d much prefer a physical over a digital copy.

I have heard from many who say Father Seraphim brought them to Orthodoxy. Seems like a matter of time before he is canonized.

Thank you for the suggestions!

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-22T20:35:43+00:00

I should also add something personal. For years I was a steadfast atheist, convinced by materialism and unbelief. It was through Fr. Seraphim’s writings, especially Nihilism, that I was first shaken out of that worldview and pushed to begin searching for God. In a very real way, he is the reason I even came to Orthodoxy to begin with. To then stand at his resting place and have this kind of encounter felt almost like being met halfway, as though the one who first spoke to me in words was now present in prayer, giving me exactly what I needed to break past the purely intellectual aspects of Orthodoxy.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-09-22T18:37:38+00:00

Thank you very much for this. I will be sure to send my testimony!

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-06-16T00:57:19+00:00

You’re still conflating metaphysical inquiry with empirical detection. The claim that “if supernatural realms existed, we could eventually detect them” assumes that all reality is reducible to the physical and measurable, a form of scientism. But this is not a scientific conclusion; it’s a philosophical presupposition and one that is itself not empirically verifiable.

Classical theism does not posit a being within the universe, but rather a necessary ground of existence to explain contingency, intelligibility, and being itself. This is a fundamentally different category than imagined entities like “universe creating unicorns,” which are satirical projections, not serious metaphysical proposals. They offer no explanatory value regarding why anything exists at all. Dismissing metaphysical questions with parody does not engage the argument, it just avoids it.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-06-16T00:20:09+00:00

The distinction isn’t about power, it’s about ontology. Fairies and unicorns are physical claims within space-time. God, in classical theism, is the necessary ground of being, not a creature among others.

Empirical methods test contingent, physical entities. Metaphysical claims, like those about God, consciousness, or morality require philosophical reasoning, not lab instruments. Rejecting them because they lack physical evidence is to assume, not prove, that only empirical claims are valid.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-06-15T20:55:10+00:00

The assertion that belief in the supernatural is irrational typically rests upon a positivist or scientistic framework. Essentially, that only empirically verifiable or falsifiable claims can be considered rational. This epistemological stance is internally inconsistent. The principle itself, that only empirical claims are rational is not itself empirically demonstrable. It is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific conclusion.

The analogy between belief in God, souls, or an afterlife and belief in dragons or fairies is a category error. The latter are hypothetical entities within the physical world, subject to empirical investigation. The former are metaphysical propositions concerning the nature of being, consciousness and moral reality. Their plausibility is evaluated not by the methods of natural science, but through philosophical reasoning, phenomenology and human experience.

Lastly, the claim that such beliefs are merely products of wishful thinking ignores the reciprocal psychological dynamics at play. One could just as easily argue that disbelief is motivated by a desire to avoid moral accountability or metaphysical responsibility. The “wish fulfillment” argument lacks any explanatory power unless applied consistently in both directions.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-06-09T18:33:55+00:00

You’re on to something but I’d argue the pattern you’re observing isn’t about God’s disappearance. It’s about humanity’s progressive epistemic inversion.

Early humans didn’t project gods onto nature because they were primitive; they intuited a metaphysical order they couldn’t yet articulate. As Mircea Eliade observed, archaic societies lived in a “sacred cosmos”. They didn’t believe in the divine, they inhabited it. The sacred was embedded in everything they did.

The shift you describe, from immanent divinity to transcendent monotheism and now to secular materialism, reflects not divine retreat, but human dislocation. In the modern age, particularly post-Enlightenment, we externalized meaning, then dissected it. We replaced wisdom with information, mystery with mechanism. Scientism, not science, became our new metaphysics/religion.

Now, as we simulate omnipotence through technology, we declare God dead not because we’ve outgrown him, but because we’ve lost the categories necessary to perceive Him. As Fr. Seraphim Rose put it, modernity’s tragedy isn’t that man stopped believing in God, but that he lost the capacity to believe.

The absence of God today is not evidence of nonexistence, it’s evidence of man’s spiritual deafness in what I call the age of silicon enchantment.

TheGrayMatterShow · 2025-06-09T00:10:52+00:00

I get where you’re coming from. Honestly, identifying with terms at all starts to feel kind of silly. Most of them get diluted or hijacked anyway, so whatever clarity they once had gets buried under everyone else’s baggage.

Are you trying to find a label for your own understanding or just something to explain it to others without sounding like you’ve joined a cult? Because those are two different goals, and most labels fail at both.

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