True Detective is the modern story of the hero’s journey. It is the allegory of one man’s disenchantment with the cosmic powers that seemed to take away his control over his life and destiny. It’s the story of how, after a lifetime of inner struggle, Rust Cohle finally enters the labyrinth of his mind to face and defeat his own demonic Moby Dick, the great whale, the monstrous Yellow King.
He sees, in his mind’s eye, the grand unity of his life and of every life, and he articulates it in a way that has been done for centuries – as a cosmic shadow-play of light and darkness dancing on the fringes of our consciousness. “Looking out those windows every night just thinking,” he tells his friend, “it’s just one story. The oldest – light versus dark.”
At the end of his battle for control of his life, he realises that that was never really the object of his struggle, and that the course of his life was always his to chart. He gets up and walks away from the powerlessness of his past, taking control of his life, making his destiny his decision.
This is our oldest story. This is the allegory of life that each of us plays out on our journeys, on our own quests for that simple realisation that we are the creators of our worlds, that we are the masters of our destinies. This is the simple/profound teaching that we’ve been trying to teach ourselves since we first tapped into our own consciousnesses and articulated the myths that made our earliest religions.
But, if this is old truth, why should a man like Rust – a seeker of truth – have had to endure his mental anguish without the knowledge/faith that he was on the same journey that every human has ever been, and that its conclusion would be in the realisation of his own power? Embittered by his isolation, Rust was a man marginalised because of a neurological system that should have been recognised as genius, but whose ideas were dismissed as rancorous by a society still burdened by superstition.
It seems unfair. The answers are there, but we aren’t taught them. Rust knew there was more to his mind, but he’d been taught to ignore his metaphysical power because it was encased in the shell of dogmatic religion. He was never taught that there was a deeper kernel beyond the dogmatic.
But that’s the bequest of a society that cast out its existential allegories because of its distaste for the corruptions of priests five hundred years ago. It’s the bequest of a society that didn’t realise the value of its spiritual inheritance – the teaching that the cosmic power resides within us, that we are the makers of our own worlds, and that we are the true masters of the universe.
This is the true religion that we were never taught. This was the misfortune that Rust lived with every night when he looked up at the night’s darkness and saw himself alone. Until he came to the edge of death and his mind allowed itself a peak into the power it had been taught to ignore. Then, in that epiphanic moment, when his definitions faded and subject disappeared into object, he felt that “beneath that darkness there was another kind – it was deeper – warm, like a substance.” In that eternal moment, he could feel his father’s peace, he could feel his daughter and her love – “even more than before … nothing but that love.”
And that is the bequest of true religion – to look up at the night sky and see hope in the cosmic play, to see the darkness as simply the shadow of our own great, grand light.