The Allegory of the Cake
Revised from an October 2025 lecture.
As long as they are over there, the modern person, especially the intellectual, can accept mystical experiences, which I prefer to call “more reality.” In one sense, the experience of “more reality” is placed over there in the distance of time—the medieval nuns, monks, and others who spoke and wrote about their visions and their divine union with God. Despite the risks inherent to doing so, they insisted on sharing their stories. What they experienced must have been so beautiful and important that they could not keep it to themselves. It must have reminded them what they already knew but had forgotten: that this life’s end was not actually the end.
The “mystical” is also placed over there through cultural difference. For less progressive thinkers, global indigenous, non-materialist knowledge is, quite simply, primitive. For the progressive modern person, the non-materialist knowledge of indigenous societies is “not for us to understand.” Given the violence with which this knowledge has been historically met, spiritual leaders of these various cultural groups have controlled or closed broader access to it. Though some of this knowledge relates to cosmic laws, and, as such, belongs to all of humanity, its splitting across various cultures across the globe helped preserve it from total cooption and destruction. Though the long-prophesied Now is the moment in which it is safer to talk about this knowledge, the modern world is slow to understand all this, having deemed prophecies themselves “irrational.”
In any case, it is difficult for the modern person to displace and dismiss the experience of more reality as over there when the initiate—the one who has begun experiencing “mystical” experiences: 1) was raised in “modern” society; 2) does not belong to a legally or historically recognized indigenous group; 3) cannot pretend that life-changing knowing can be compartmentalized; and 4) is standing in front of them. The non-initiate may comfort themselves with the thought that, surely this modern, non-indigenous initiate pursued the knowing through a culturally based Afro-Caribbean spiritual group (because this initiate herself happens to be Afro-Caribbean in this lifetime) or perhaps something equally acceptable, such as Buddhism. They would be wrong on both counts; though both routes may lead some to Source, the initiate in question (me) had not been trained in these lineages and did not grow up in proximity to them. The initiate in question abandoned Catholicism as a young proto-feminist at age twelve.
In the summer of 2023, I was humming along in the disenchanted cynicism that defines a specific kind of modern human experience when the divine visions and initiations started out of nowhere. I’d always had pre-cognitive dreams, a terrifying power of knowing that someone close to me was about to pass away. I’d always had lucid dreams (most nerdily, I studied for Japanese language quizzes by repeatedly writing kanji characters while physically asleep but mentally awake) and dreams that many associate with “shamanic” initiation, especially repetitive dreams about snakes. But these visions and initiations were nothing like that. Most surprising, they involved realms, geometries, architectures, and revered but misunderstood conscious intelligences unrelated to either Afro-Caribbean or Buddhist traditions.
After two full years of relentless and frequently painful initiations through divine flame—to me, comparable only to the ego-eviscerating ordeals portrayed in the kung fu film The 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Malidoma Patrice Somé’s Of Water and Spirit, I finally learned that my architecture streams from elsewhere entirely. And why not? The soul has neither race nor culture, though the latter two may overlap with the experience of the initiate.
This case of the modern, non-indigenous initiate is like the one who has eaten a piece of chocolate cake, delighted to remember that such a thing actually, literally, exists. In the rare times she tells others about it, she may be met with blank stares or befuddlement. The listener may be aware that recipes for a thing called chocolate cake exist. They may recite some of these recipes at parties, having memorized them. They may perform in costume as their favorite ancient Cake Eater or write a biography of a great medieval Cake Eater. They may even dedicate their entire career solely to the study of recipes.
When faced with a living, breathing Cake Eater, however, they are not quite sure what to do. They thought the recipe was a beautiful metaphor to be read with cool, distant appreciation. The Recipe Reader may politely—but sternly, for they want to change the topic—suggest that the Cake Eater read this “wonderful” seventeenth-century cake recipe. Another may enthusiastically ask the Cake Eater if she’s heard the new song about a famed, and long-dead, Cake Eater. One Recipe Reader insists, “but, of course, this is all symbolic, in the end.”
There are those who walk one of the many paths to finding Cake, but also seem incapable of understanding that some have already eaten it, applying a blanket of sameness and “we.” The Cake Eater insists that having eaten cake does not mean Source radiates more on her, but it does give her certain tools that the Cake Curious may be . . . well . . . curious about, if they listened. The problem is that the modern-day Cake Curious may have predetermined ideas about what a Cake Eater looks and behaves like, and it does not match this Cake Eater. Oh well!
In short, no one the Cake Eater encounters seem capable of listening to her. The Cake Eater comes to learn the lesson: the avid Recipe Reader does not usually want to hear about the actual cake. Many Cake Curious do want to hear from Cake Eaters, but not her.
The Cake Eater’s guide-kin roll their eyes (not literal eyes) and say: “Finally! Now can we move on to the actual thing you should be doing.” The Cake Eater probably chastises her guide-kin for not telling her sooner, even though she knows that’s not how it works, but then looks down and notices that there is an enormous chasm between her and the Recipe Readers and the Cake Curious. But she also notices the faint silhouettes of those who yearn, who ache, to jump over the chasm. She calls them the Cake Seekers. She also senses—but does not yet hear or see—other Cake Eaters who hover nearby, proverbially, in the fog.
And she also knows this: The Recipe Readers and the Cake Curious have all eaten cake before, but they do not remember it. The Cake Eater’s guide-kin remind her: all paths are sacred, but do not waste your energy on those who choose to not jump the chasm at this time. Let them read their recipes or follow the windier paths, they continue, you are here for the others.