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Thick vs. Thin Culture
How the Tall Grass of Reality Has Become Too Painful to Walk On
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.’“ — C.S. Lewis
The Great Divorce
The infamous “Fire Walks” of the Not-Your-Guru Tony Robbins — at which participants at self-help seminars attempt to walk over burning hot coals, and sometimes get severely burned — is but a thin, superficial, NLP-induced version of a concept that C.S. Lewis illustrated in his fantastical book, The Great Divorce.
I’ll say it upfront: I find the Robbins Fire Walks to be a sad summation of the thinness of our culture — and the deep desire of people to become real.
In Lewis’s book, the narrator of the story lives in a dull, grey town. He finds a magical bus stop and boards a coach with other people who desire an excursion to some other place — any other place.
They don’t realize it, but the town they left was a kind of purgatory. And the bus they’re on is attempting to take them toward heaven.
As they ascend, their bodies are revealed to be transparent and vapor-like. They discover, to their great horror, that they’re not solid — they are, in fact, ghosts.
When they are finally able to get off the bus, they encounter grass so sharp and hard that their feet can’t bear it.
The narrator describes this new place:
Walking proved difficult. The grass, hard as diamonds to my unsubstantial feet, made me feel as if I were walking on wrinkled rock, and I suffered pains…
They were shallow people who lacked depth — and with it, weight — which would have allowed them to walk on the grass. They desired to go back to the grey town from where they had come.
In short, they didn’t want to live a real life. The counter-intuitive point of Lewis’s story is that for those who don’t desire the real things of heaven, it’s quite a painful place. They don’t even want to live in it.
