Heretic Asylum was created as a place to inspire weary souls who were tired of all the sectarian infighting and competing truth claims of world religions, but not broken enough to give up the search for their own spiritual home. It’s a safe haven for those who yearn for the Truth that can be told in all tongues, and demand the choice of how to say it that only freedom of expression can provide.
This is what “heretic” means after all: one who chooses for oneself. “Heresy” is derived from the Ancient Greek “haíresis”(αἵρεσις), a neutral term referring to the choice one makes between philosophies or guiding principles. The borrowed Latin word “hæresis” had the same meaning: choice within the marketplace of ideas that grew broader as the Roman Empire expanded and mingled with a wider range of cultures.
It was in the shift into Old French and Middle English “heresie” where it acquired the current negative meaning of an idea or doctrine that runs contrary to established church teachings.
This wasn’t a good thing, neither for humanity nor for Truth. The human imagination is much greater than any one person can imagine, and Truth itself is infinitely far beyond that. The individual mind expands at first by opening to all that the collective human mind has considered possible, which in turn expands as its explorers and pioneers pursue the novelty of new ideas. Because neither the individual nor the collective can wrap its whole mind around Absolute Truth, the best we can do is express what we learn through relative truths — what is time-tested and verified within a specific context — and it is from these relative truths that individuals learn to choose their preferred expressions of Absolute Truth. Channelling the human imagination in this way is good; it gives us the sense of direction we need to navigate the world and make sense of what would otherwise be the sensory overload of an unintelligible blur.
When one relative truth is held out to be Absolute Truth, though, and not a symbol pointing us toward Truth, the human imagination is inhibited or even prohibited from choosing, and digs itself firmly into the one channel it was given. When a critical mass of humanity gets stuck in these kinds of entrenched channels, the very idea that Absolute Truth is beyond our capacity to imagine gets stifled and eventually lost. Then we become warring factions fighting for the supremacy of our own relative truth that we mistake for the Absolute.
The heretic seeks to release us from this rigidity, not from some ego-driven desire to be edgy or recalcitrant, but from faithful service to Absolute Truth. The heretic shakes us out of our entrenched channels so that Truth may once again unite us rather than be another source of division. (Ironic, isn’t it, that we are cast by those respective channels as the divisive ones.) Loyal heretics are those who choose to work primarily within the confines of specific channels, pushing their boundaries so that they may overlap with their neighbors. Heretic Asylum works from a universalist perspective, but we respect and honor loyal heretics as well.
Note how different this is from the post-modern notion that “all truth is relative” (isn’t that a loaded contradiction!) and competing subjectivity is all we can know. No, when and where the heretics are allowed to do their job, it is clear that, wordless as it might or must be, there is one singular Truth within which we all exist, and those channels we created are paths to an ever deeper understanding of that Truth. This is the logic behind the catch-all mantra we chose as the unofficial motto for Heretic Asylum: “Truth is One, Paths are Many.” To this the loyal heretic will add: Choose your path wisely, not because eternal life or death rests on the balance, but because wisdom is the goal, the whole reason we enter “the high country of the Mind” (as Phaedrus called it in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book that started me along the heretic route).
I started Heretic Asylum in 2013* as a website and rebrand of an older Facebook page. For several years while I myself got too entrenched in a couple of those channels (Pantheism and Non-Duality), I ran them under a few different banners while focusing on building a library of heretical novels and essays. The decision to bring back the original name resulted from contemplation about how I wanted to market my next novel, The Rise and Fall of the Cielo Republic. Since it is the best example yet of what I mean by the work of the heretic, it really made sense to get back to my roots and represent every part of that mandala, not just the one I prefer for self-expression.
Perennialism, the reverential study of Absolute Truth via all of its relative channels, makes one a heretic to all. So be it, but I will choose the kind of heresy I represent, and I claim the original Greek-Latin origin of the term, not the modern one.
*There is a bit of mythologizing in the “official” 2016 origin for the publishing house that makes it match with one of the details in The Rise and Fall of the Cielo Republic, thus the discrepancy with the original backstory. But late 2016 is also when I started using “Waldo Noesta” as a pen name and more broadly as a pseudonym for all public-facing functions of writing, so in that sense 2016 is when the base of the current “team” began working on this project. The team now and forever includes Jamie Reville, my wife, co-Muse, soul twin, and fellow heretic.
Heretic Asylum 