Cold Stone Religion
I went to Cold Stone by myself a couple of weeks ago. There was a line of three or four people ahead of me. I watched them order, mixing in all sorts of things, brownie and caramel and cookie dough and whatever else was available. When I got to the counter I ordered vanilla with brownie. They were out of vanilla, so the clerk suggested sweet cream instead. I had never tried it but why not.
It arrived looking almost exactly like vanilla. But the first bite was different. Vanilla has a flavor, a clean one, but it's still a flavor added to something. This was just cold and a little sweet and nothing else. No top note, no finish. Just the base.
And for reasons I still can't fully explain, I immediately thought about God.
Not God in any particular tradition's sense of the word. More like the thing that mystics keep trying to describe and keep failing to, not because they're bad at language but because language is the wrong tool for it. The experience that sits underneath all the explanations of the experience. I've had moments of contact with that thing over the last 40 years. They don't taste like anything I can name.
That's what the sweet cream tasted like. The base before anything gets added.
Which got me thinking about everything that gets added.
Every tradition I've ever studied, every teaching I've read, every lineage with its vocabulary and its metaphysics and its moral architecture, those are flavors. Real flavors. Genuinely good ones, many of them. They exist because someone had contact with the sweet cream and then spent the rest of their life trying to describe it to people who hadn't. And the only tools available were stories, concepts, rituals, teachers, institutions. Mixins, all of it. Added to the base in good faith, mostly.
I've watched people order at Cold Stone for years. I used to take my kids there when they were young, and they approached the process the way children approach most things, which is to say with complete commitment to maximalism. Brownies, cookie dough, gummy bears, caramel, hot fudge, sprinkles. Whatever was available. The goal was not ice cream. The goal was everything.
I was never going to talk them out of it, nor did I want to. That's what Cold Stone is for. But I noticed that almost nobody, children or adults, ever walked out with just the base. The plain ice cream, unmodified, seemed to embarrass people somehow. Like it wasn't enough. Like you had to justify the trip.
I watched that for years without knowing I was watching anything.
The Reformation is when Cold Stone got really complicated. Suddenly everyone had an opinion about which mixins were corruptions and which were essential, and the response to too many toppings was almost always more toppings, just different ones. How many versions of Christianity claim to be the original recipe Jesus intended? Each one is certain the others added too much. None of them are ordering sweet cream.
The 19th and 20th centuries made it stranger still. New movements, new combinations, some of them so far from the base that calling them ice cream at all requires generosity. Frozen yogurt, maybe. Looks similar, served the same way, but the base is something else entirely, and it started as something else entirely. And those get mixins as well.
What mystics are after, across every tradition, is the sweet cream. The flavors and the mixins are the vehicles most people need to get anywhere close, and I'm not arguing against them. Over the last 40 years I've worked with plenty of mixins. You work with what you have.
The fastest growing spiritual demographic right now is spiritual but not religious. I think that's an instinct toward the sweet cream. People sense that the traditions have accumulated too much, that somewhere underneath all of it there's a base they want to taste. The impulse is honest. But every teacher, every guide, every practice you pick up to help you get there is going to add something. That's not a flaw in the teachers. That's just what language and method do. You can't point at the sweet cream without adding a finger to the picture.
I finished my sweet cream with brownie, most of which ended up at the bottom of the cup. But what stayed with me was the sweet cream. The taste of it, and underneath that, the memory of other moments over the last 40 years when I'd been in contact with something I couldn't name. Same base. Different circumstances.
I'm still not sure there's a clean path to it. But I think it helps to know what you're looking for.